Error Bars

Another sign the new season isn’t quite so new? You find yourself struggling to accentuate the positive when things don’t go well.

Things didn’t go well Tuesday night in Miami: Kodai Senga was shaky early, the Mets’ hitting resurgence turned out to be a one-day affair, and Francisco Lindor made not one but two errors at shortstop. The first was just an annoyance, forcing Senga to throw all of one extra pitch, but the second led to disaster, as someone named Graham Pauley doubled two runs home, providing the margin the Marlins would need to beat the Mets behind Sandy Alcantara and his second audition for a new summer employer.

OK, there were some positives. Senga’s ghost fork was effective, which was reassuring after a spring training in which Senga didn’t quite look like himself and you heard mild but real rumblings of discontent around him. Max Kranick contributed three innings of flawless pitching. Luisangel Acuna looked good whether equipped with bat or glove. And new father Lindor did collect his first hit and RBI.

But that didn’t wind up feeling like much in light of that 4-2 verdict, which grates a little more because it was the Marlins at Soilmaster Stadium. (Though it sounded more like Citi Field South.) Once again the Mets looked set up for a storybook finish that fizzled. Once again the bats slumbered. Once again things felt off-kilter and out of sorts.

So far the Mets are a team that was predicted to mash but has done so for exactly one night, and a team that has had superb starting pitching when that was supposed to be their biggest question mark. Don’t try to make sense of it; that so far ought to be the tipoff that we’re attending Small Sample Size Theater, which is reliably surreal, and of course baseball is nothing if not a serial confounder of expectations.

A relatively recent addition to baseball discussions is the concept of error bars — how actual performance can deviate from baseline expectations, both for better and for worse. The Mets’ error bars are a little arsy versy right now in multiple ways, with the starting pitchers bunched up where we thought we’d find the hitters and the hitters occupying the space where we thought we’d find the starters. That’s part of baseball too; it’ll either work itself out or we’ll tell stories about why it didn’t, and eventually those stories will come to make sense. But right now nothing much does. It’s too early to say what this incarnation of the Mets will turn out to be, but we can all hope it involves a lot fewer games like Tuesday’s.