The Mets beat the White Sox behind back-to-back homers from Pete Alonso and Jesse Winker, with Jose Butto surviving a decidedly shaky ninth to secure the save.
That’s the brief, pertinent-facts-only recap of a game I absorbed in fits and starts — I’m out here in Tacoma getting my kid moved back into a dorm room, so we were back and forth between campus and the storage locker, then between the parking lot and the room — a lather rinse repeat I wager many of you will remember from either moving kids in and out of rooms or from your own college days.
The Mets did what they did and the White Sox did what they did, and even though a fair number of individual plays eluded me amid the to and fro, I got the gist. The White Sox had scored a run, but it wasn’t a big blow; the Mets had scored again to push them back; the details were shifting but things were pretty much as they were after the initial ambush of poor Davis Martin.
This vague baseball osmosis made me think of something, and I’ll ask you to grade my terminology on the curve, as it’s early morning on the West Coast and I’m a writer, not a scientist: The badness of teams like the 2024 White Sox is a gas, expanding to fill whatever volume is available to contain it.
The Mets have taken the first two games of the series from Chicago, hopefully on their way to a sweep, and as Met fans we’ve of course instinctively compared the White Sox to the ’62 Mets, whether we remember them from the Polo Grounds or just from absorbing team lore.
But it’s not like the White Sox have been engaged in the kind of hideous baseball slapstick made famous by those Mets, or blown a pair of gigantic leads. They haven’t made every play, but their defense hasn’t been glaringly inept. The pitching hasn’t been great, but it hasn’t been obviously incompetent. The hitting … well, OK, they simply haven’t hit.
This is what led me to the gas thing: The White Sox have supplied the amount of badness required to lose by four runs, and then to lose by two, because that’s what bad teams do. They’ll come apart in spectacular fashion if need be, but mostly they just groan and grind and fail.
I say this with zero animus and in fact considerable sympathy, as the White Sox remind me of Mets teams I’ve endured: They look like the Mets of red-giant-stage Roberto Alomar and Jason Phillips, like the Mets of Tommy Milone and Neil Ramirez. And suspect they’re a lot like the ’62 Mets, whose misdeeds are a curated lowlight reel by now, one that ignores a lot of dull three- and four-run defeats that came without quips in Stengelese or funny stories.
Those Met teams just lost and lost and lost, until all you wanted was for them to go away and leave you in whatever passes for peace when you’re a fan of a bad ballclub. Whatever Chicago’s record winds up being, their fans have my sympathies. I’m a Mets fan; I’ve been there.
The White Sox may look like a regularly bad team, but they must be doing something epically bad to have lost so many games, even figuring bad luck into the mix.
I used to think there was winning baseball and losing baseball. I’ve decided we also need, “Good enough to beat the White Sox” baseball.
I haven’t really liked what I’ve seen from the Mets this series. Lot of walks given up, our RISP BA is still low, passed balls, loose baserunning, mediocre fielding, etc. But twice now we’ve ended up with more runs.
Hope we can do as well today and really hope we tighten things up starting Monday.
The Mets play down, so that’s not a surprise. The Red Sox are the rough equivalent of the Mets in the AL wildcard race. The Mets play down and play up, but what does playing on the same level look like? The Red Sox have been scuffling too.
We were there in May, but not like White Sox fans. For perspective, the Mets at their worst fell to 11 under .500 at 22-33 and then 24-35 before getting hot. The White Sox fell to 11 under .500 at 2-13 and have kept falling.
Garrett Crochet last pitched more than 4 innings on June 30. It looks like an innings limit rather than a pitch limit since his pitches thrown have fluctuated. That makes him less scary than I thought.
Still, the Mets have lost a number of sweep or rubber Sunday games playing down. I would not be surprised if they lost this one. Maybe throwing 4 pitches in his last start will allow Crochet to pitch to normal innings and pitch count this game. On the other hand, the Mets have beaten aces with regularity, so facing Crochet could balance things out.
Sorry, it was 1974.
https://www.discogs.com/release/3481432-The-Realistics-Todays-Greatest-Hits-Volume-One/image/SW1hZ2U6NTQ0NzQ0Mzk=
I think there’s actually lot to what you’re saying about bad teams being just bad enough. I remember a conversation I had with a fellow seventh grader in the late ‘70’s. I said, look, the Mets aren’t really so bad. They score some runs and make some good plays on the field. And they’re not really blown out that often. Look, in the last seven (eight? nine?) game losing streak, they lost most of the games by only one run.
Yeah, my friend said, but they still lost them.
He was right and I was wrong. Close only counts in horseshoes.
I feel for the Chisox fans. Been there. Done that.