When they announce the next year’s baseball schedule I take a look, because how can’t you? But after a couple of glances — When’s the home opener? How many times do we go to the West Coast? — I go back to whatever I was doing. The dates are far off, you have no idea which teams will have made leaps forward or taken steps back, and everything’s just too theoretical for deep engagement.
Then the schedule becomes real, and if you find yourself with something to fight for in September, you pore over every remaining game, estimating and fussing and wondering and worrying.
The Mets reported for duty at Citizens Bank Park facing a gantlet: seven against the Phillies, interrupted by three with the Nats, then three with the Braves and three with the Brewers. Two first-place teams, the team the Mets are trying to hold off in the wild card, and a squad whose rebuild has accelerated.
Yikes! But it’s also true that as a baseball fan, the surest way to look foolish is to try to outguess the game.
The early innings of Friday night’s game were even more nerve-wracking than one would expect, given the stakes. The Phillies came out wearing their New Sweden on steroids City Connects (J.T. Realmuto [1]‘s yellow catching gear made him look oddly like Bumblebee from the Transformers movies) and kept hammering balls delivered by Jose Quintana [2], only to see every drive except Bryce Harper [3]‘s first-inning double find a Met glove. (Pete Alonso [4] set the tone immediately with a jai alai capture of a laser beam from Kyle Schwarber [5] that nearly tore his glove off.) Meanwhile, the Mets could do absolutely nothing against Aaron Nola [6], who got hitter after hitter to worry about his curveball and so left them gaping at the fastball.
Still, the Mets were driving Nola’s pitch count up, and that was enough to make you squint and hope a little. It was a relief when Jose Iglesias [7] led off the fifth with a single — at least there went Nola’s no-no dreams. Tyrone Taylor [8] followed with a single of his own and Nola went to work against Francisco Alvarez [9], whose ABs have been much better of late. Alvarez swung and missed at Nola’s first offering, a curve that got a little more plate than its deliverer would have liked. The second pitch was another curve, lower and inside and harder to square up in isolation, but Alvarez was now looking for a curve in that general area. He golfed the ball into the night, waving it fair and watching it rattle off the foul pole for a 3-0 Mets lead.
Jubilation, and the Mets weren’t done: After singles from Francisco Lindor [10] and Mark Vientos [11], Brandon Nimmo [12] hammered another Nola curve into the right-field stands for the second three-run shot of the inning. The Mets were up 6-0, Nola was exiting, and wasn’t baseball wonderful?
That was all Quintana needed as he cruised through seven innings, Harrison Bader [13] added a three-run shot of his own (nine runs via three-run shots — Earl Weaver [14] would have been delighted), and the Mets finished up taking their hacks against Roger Clemens [15]‘ kid, the one named Knothole or Knitcap or some other stupid K word inflicted on him by his war-criminal father. There was a bit of fuss in the ninth as Alex Young [16] ran into trouble and Lindor left early with what’s being called lower-back soreness; the former can be dismissed with a wave at the scoreboard [17], and we’ll worry about the latter when we’re told we have to.
Only the most deluded optimist would high-five madly at having survived 6.25% of the gantlet, but only the most determined pessimist would get so hung up on the remaining 93.75% that he’d refuse to enjoy the moment.
It’s baseball; don’t try to outguess it.