I Could Get Used to This

Friday night’s game ended with the sweetest of words. Am I referring to “Mets win” or  to “put it in the books?” To quote the tyke from the Internet meme, “Why not both?”

On Thursday the Mets did a lot of things right — hitters refused to expand the strike zone and heretofore suspect relievers pitched with conviction — with the nagging exception of winning the game, as some mean-spirited person ripped out the storybook ending and replaced it with a picture of a sad trombone and a blatted note.

On Friday they once again did a lot of things right, and this time it worked out. The hitters were selective again — Pete Alonso in particular has kept his aggression channeled, avoiding the panicky, I ALONE CAN FIX IT ABs he too often falls prey to. Juan Soto looks, well, Sotoesque, which is wonderful to see up close on a nightly basis. I love the way his plate appearances become these odd running conversations in which he seems to be workshopping his approach with the umpire, the catcher and the hitting coach in his head — and I was predictably overjoyed when Soto hit his first Mets home run, an easy-power line drive off the facing of the right-field deck. That extended a 2-0 Mets lead built with the help of some Houston infield slapstick to 3-0, which didn’t feel like enough but was obviously better than looking uphill all Thursday evening.

On the pitching side, at least for one night Tylor Megill looked like the Tylor Megill that the sabermetrically inclined keep insisting is in there somewhere. Megill trusted his stuff and went after the Astros lineup, keeping his pitch count manageable. It looked like the wheels might come off in the fourth, when Jose Altuve and Isaac Paredes singled to bring up Yordan Alvarez with nobody out. But Megill got Alvarez to fly out to center (a sac fly but nothing more), then struck out Christian Walker and Yainer Diaz with sliders at the bottom of the zone.

That was the kind of inning I was used to seeing get away from Megill — too much nibbling, too little conviction, a mounting pitch count, a ball with too much plate, a dejected trudge off the mound. Not this time — and Megill then navigated the fifth with minimal fuss and deserved better in the sixth. He fanned Jake Meyers to start the inning but watched Meyers scamper to first when the ball kicked off Luis Torrens‘ glove, then got a ground ball from Altuve only to see it elude Francisco Lindor. A little better luck and Megill might have been looking at completing six; instead he had to watch from the dugout as Reed Garrett took over with the game hanging the balance.

Garrett was up to the task, bedeviling the Astros with sinkers, sliders and sweepers to keep the lead at two. “REED FUCKING GARRETT!” I yelled as Garrett marched off the mound, looking like he was yelling something similar.

The Apple TV+ broadcasts aren’t my favorite — the churning probabilities are witless clutter, the fonts all feel too small, and the general feeling is that you’re trapped in some sort of baseball-adjacent app instead of a broadcast. But I do marvel at the fact that you can sync up the picture with either team’s radio feed. That’s a genuine kindness offered to fans, and it actually works — which I mean not in the sense of “the world is so terrible that I’m amazed something functions” but in the sense of “syncing feeds like that sounds super-difficult and the result is flawless, how did they do that?”

Howie Rose and Keith Raad were particularly welcome company because the torpor of spring training had tricked me into forgetting how stressful this all is. First I was barking at Garrett, then I was barking at A.J. Minter (who will probably look out of uniform until late May), then I was barking at Ryne Stanek, and then I was encouraging Edwin Diaz with dread perilously close to the surface, which is a fancy way of saying I was barking at him too. At several points during the barkfest I thought to myself, “My God, it isn’t even April yet.” Like the ad says, ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for Mets.

An eye doctor might have been useful too, as the kindest thing one can say about Rob Drake’s strike zone is that it was equitably random. Anything on the outer edge or the bottom border of the strike zone was a coin flip, sometimes not even consistent within at at-bat, but roughly equal numbers of guys in Mets uniforms and Astros uniforms wound up rolling their eyes or huffing in disbelief, so it was more farce than tragedy.

Speaking of uniforms, I hate the Mets’ new road togs. The Mets’ away uniform was both iconic and had a lengthy history; the replacement looks like a knockoff you’d find on Canal Street. The little racing stripes are unnecessary and half-hearted, calling to mind the elusive glories of the de Roulet era, and NEW YORK looks floaty and adrift without the yoke of piping to anchor it. There was no reason to futz with something that worked so beautifully, which I’d thought was something the current regime understood.

Still, win enough games in the new grays and I’ll forgive the unnecessary tinkering. The Mets did that — Diaz was even refreshingly non-terrifying in working a 1-2-3 ninth — and that’s something I could get used to.