The Mets beat the White Sox behind back-to-back homers from Pete Alonso [1] and Jesse Winker [2], with Jose Butto [3] surviving a decidedly shaky ninth to secure the save.
That’s the brief, pertinent-facts-only recap [4] 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 [5].
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 [6] and Jason Phillips [7], like the Mets of Tommy Milone [8] and Neil Ramirez [9]. 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.