It was the ninth inning against the Phillies, 10 days ago, and ESPN’s little win probability thing (a sop to gamblers, but that’s another post) was making me insane.
It said the Phillies had an 8% chance of coming back to beat the Mets, which was obviously wrong. Obviously and deliberately and nefariously wrong. I didn’t know the Phillies’ win probability — how would you even calculate that? — but I knew mischance and misfortune, and it seemed far more likely that the Phillies’ win probability was around 80%, with the only question the nature of the disaster waiting in ambush.
Instead the Mets won. I was no longer paying close attention but I assume the win probability thing ticked to 100% before being ushered out of view.
After the Mets claimed Game 1 of their Monday special against the Braves, punching their postseason ticket in what may well have been the best regular-season game in club history (now there’s an offseason post/series to look forward to), I took advantage of Game 2’s vacation from anxieties to pore over the game thread on Battery Power, the SB Nation blog that’s the Braves equivalent of our beloved Amazin’ Avenue [1]. I wanted a real-time record of Braves fans being imperious before being brought low, and to see their assumption of doom for the Mets get forcibly and delightfully corrected.
But that wasn’t what I found. Instead, to my surprise, I found a hairball of angst [2], one that snarled up long before Tyrone Taylor [3] Shawon’ed Spencer Schwellenbach [4] out of the game: Matt Olson [5] couldn’t hit, Marcell Ozuna [6] would never hit again, Travis d’Arnaud [7] only ever grounds out, Brian Snitker [8] always leaves his starters in too long, Joe Jimenez [9] is reliably terrible, and on and on and on.
Press a Met fan into service as a TV meteorologist and she’ll stand in front of the map with a dozen variations on black clouds and lightning bolts and maybe one wanly yellow little sun, which she’ll bashfully keep behind her back. That’s our reputation as a fanbase, and it’s one we haven’t exactly run from — if anything, we’ve run toward it when things have gone wrong or look like they might go wrong or we assume they’ll go wrong because things have gone wrong before.
But it turns out every team’s fanbase does this. (Twitter is now 1/3 conspiracy loons, 1/3 Bitcoin grifters and 1/3 Yankee fans calling for the head of Aaron Boone [10].) We all think our lineup is made up of ticking time bombs, our franchise is run by dimwits and/or saboteurs, and our win probability is actually around a tenth of whatever the gamblers are being told.
I was scowling at that win probability thing again Tuesday night, as the Mets came back to Milwaukee to take on the Brewers at the what the fuck is this shit time of 5:30 pm.
The Brewers who’d rather idly taken two out of three from a weirdly tight post-rainouts Mets team not very long ago.
The Brewers of Brice Turang [11] and Jackson Chourio [12] and Garrett Mitchell [13] and other guys whose features I’m not familiar with because I’ve mostly only registered them as blurs stealing second and then zipping home.
The Brewers of Rhys Hoskins [14], because of course.
The Mets fell behind 2-0 against those Brewers in the bottom of the first, as some plays you’d like to see made weren’t and Luis Severino [15] reported for duty missing his location and a reliable putaway pitch. It was 2-0, and clearly our win probability was 0.00000000%.
Except the Mets leapt off the mat in the top of the second: Mark Vientos [16] singled (he had terrific ABs all night), Pete Alonso [17] walked and up came Jesse Winker [18], who’d been mired in a deep slump and waylaid by back issues of his own. Winker saw eight pitches from Freddy Peralta [19], whistling the eighth into the right-field corner to tie the game and take himself to third with a triple, and if you had JESSE WINKER TWO-RUN TRIPLE on your bingo card, well, my cap is tipped. He came home on a sac fly from Starling Marte [20], another Met who quietly put together a night of solid ABs, and just like that the Mets led 3-2.
But once again, Severino didn’t look right. He worked through traffic in the second and third, then gave back the lead in the fourth, with the inevitable Turang front and center at the Brewer raceway. (Remember when Milwaukee lineups were made up of one scrawny infielder and eight dudes who looked like Daniel Vogelbach [21], including the actual Daniel Vogelbach for a time? I liked that better.) The Mets were down a run (win probability 0.0000000%) and Milwaukee’s Pat Mitchell decided that was enough from Peralta, dipping into his formidable bullpen and summoning Joel Payamps [22].
It didn’t work. Payamps got Marte when Chourio made a leaping grab at the fence, allowed a double to Taylor on a ball Chourio misplayed, retired Francisco Alvarez [23] for the second out, but then lost Francisco Lindor [24] on a walk. Up came Jose Iglesias [25], who smacked a ball left of first that Hoskins made a good play on, only to find Payamps a little tardy getting to first. Iglesias dove in head-first, one of the few times that play makes sense, just beating Payamps while the always-alert Taylor motored around third to tie the game.
In came Aaron Ashby [26], who allowed an infield single to Brandon Nimmo [27] and then boom: a two-run single for Vientos, followed by another one from J.D. Martinez [28], pinch-hitting for Winker.
Just like that the Mets led 8-4, and the ballgame was over. No really, it pretty much was. Severino found a little tweak that corraled his fastball — or perhaps he started pitching like he had a four-run lead and eight guys behind him — and so set down Brewer after Brewer before passing the baton to Jose Butto [29], who in turn handed it to Ryne Stanek [30].
No Brewer reached base against the three of them, and no Met tallied a hit against Nick Mears [31] or Aaron Civale [32]. Four and a half innings ticked by in a stately procession of round trips between dugouts, with the lone baserunner accounted for by a walk to Alonso. An October playoff game became one of those sleepy late June affairs in which you pick up a magazine and it winds up as a tent over your face during a baseball nap.
Which, given the emotional toll of the last week and change, wasn’t unwelcome. Eventually Stanek struck out Turang, Alvarez didn’t allow a dropped third strike, it turns out there’s no heretofore-overlooked rule that allows Turang to circle the bases five times while Met catchers fail to throw him out, and so that was that [33].
Win probability 100%. Be not afraid.