A Long Walk

With the Mets batting because they had to in the eighth inning of Thursday night’s game, I got out of my seat at Citi Field and took a walk.

The immediate reason was straightforward, but there were other reasons, too. My feet were cold. My legs were stiff. I was upset. And I knew that for various reasons it was unlikely that I’d see Citi Field again in 2024.

I wound up circumnavigating the lower level, going from my seat with the 7 Line low down in 141 past the postseason Fox pavilion and over the Shea Bridge, along the first-base line around to the top of the rotunda, up the third-base line, then through the plaza of eateries and back to my seat. Five innings earlier that would have been a foolhardy mission guaranteed to chew up multiple innings. But now it was easy: Most of the crowd had departed, leaving behind Dodger visitors and Met diehards. It reminded me of a meaningless game in May, one that hadn’t drawn too many people in the first place because it was a little cold and had seen the attendance diminish from that low base because things weren’t going the Mets’ way.

If that sounds like a terrible comparison to wind up making in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, well, you’re right in some ways and not in others.

The Mets had fallen behind as early as one can on a leadoff line-drive home run from Shohei Ohtani, but tied the game in their half of the first when Mark Vientos cracked a homer of his own off Yoshinobu Yamamoto. But the Dodgers got two more in the third and kept battering away at Jose Quintana and the Mets pen; by the time I took my walk they were up 10-2 and Danny Young was on the mound, left to absorb whatever further harm L.A. had to administer.

As fans our natural inclination is to see losses as failures. The sports-talk radio version is to filibuster about desire and will; the sophisticate’s version is to spotlight various guys on our side who didn’t get it done for various reasons to be explored via analysis. The former is straightforwardly stupid; the latter looks smart but is often misguided.

Out in center field in the 7 Line’s orange domain, there was muttering that Quintana was being squeezed. I couldn’t tell from ~450 feet away, where I was sitting between my father-in-law and Greg (our first game together since last June), but between innings I peered at previous Dodger ABs on Gameday and found no obvious signs of injustice.

What was happening was more telling: Quintana succeeds by not throwing strikes, with his pitches darting or drifting out of the confines of the zone with hitters enticed to follow, leading to swings and misses and weak contact. That worked against the Brewers and Phillies but not against the Dodgers: They refused to expand the zone, either taking free bases or forcing Quintana to relocate those pitches to where they could be squared up.

Calling that a failure of Quintana’s is a stretch; it’s far fairer to give credit to the Dodgers. Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Tommy Edman all had big nights, while Max Muncy set a postseason record by reaching base in 12 straight plate appearances before Young finally (and mercifully) retired him in the eighth. Watching the Dodgers’ relentless lineup reminded me of watching the Mets during their joyous summer run: AB after AB driving up pitch counts and squeezing out an enemy pitcher’s margin for error until the breakthrough felt inevitable.

A few Mets heard it from the crowd, most notably J.D. Martinez, but that was mostly frustration needing an outlet. The team looks tired, and understandably so — I’m exhausted and all I’ve done is watch them. And the nagging injuries look like they’re piling up: Brandon Nimmo literally limped through the evening and delivered one of the Mets’ two runs by beating out the tail end of a double play on basically one foot, which is the kind of thing that will get lost amid bigger storylines but shouldn’t.

But again, turn that around: The Dodgers squeaked past the Padres nagged by worries about their starting pitching, which is in tatters after the kind of season that called for a MASH unit. They’re on the brink of the World Series because of that relentless lineup but also because they’ve had three suspect pitchers — Jack Flaherty, Walker Buehler and now Yamamoto — come up big.

The TLDR of the above, offered by Greg in an aside that was gloomy but clear-eyed: Maybe they’re just better.

All of this was competing for space in my brain when I took my walk. I stopped for a moment in the plaza beyond the home run apple, looking up at the frieze above Shake Shack and remembering it in its old place atop the scoreboard at Shea. (Its reclamation was one of the few things we agreed the Mets had got right while Citi Field was in the growing pains of its first few seasons.)

Those Mets had been on my mind all night, partly because Robin Ventura and Edgardo Alfonzo had returned for the first pitch and John Franco had led a pregame hollering of LET’S GO METS. But looking up at the old frieze with its remembrance pin over the outline of the World Trade Center, I realized I wasn’t disparaging the 2024 Mets by comparison. I found I wasn’t angry at them, or dismayed at seeing their season shoved to the brink. All of a sudden it really did feel like a May game, one that hadn’t unfolded the way you wanted but still meant a night at the ballpark, which always feels like getting away with something.

I know myself well enough to grasp that some of my acceptance is me trying to outfox the baseball gods: During my walk a fan yelled “Mets in seven!” to no one in particular and I smiled and thought, “Well, why not?” And some of it is stubborn faith in how often this edition of the Mets has delivered a surprise; on the subway I nodded at Francisco Lindor‘s postgame declaration that “if you have no belief, you shouldn’t be here.”

I won’t be there Friday afternoon — not with the 7 Line, and not on my couch. I’ll be on an airplane heading for Seattle, investigating seatback channel options and hoping I don’t have to spring for in-flight Wi-Fi. But if I have to, I will — and you better believe I’ll be wearing my Mookie shirt under my 7 Line jersey, with Derpy Flag in my lap and talismanic utterances on my lips.

In other words, I’ll be there in the way we always are, in the way that matters. There’s clear-eyed assessment of one’s chances and there’s belief. I’ve got room for both.