Dog Watch

If Monday night’s game had happened in late May or June, I think I would have fallen all over myself calling it taut and crisp, maybe with a side of hard-fought and close-run.

And I don’t know, maybe you called it those things while on your couch. Or, God forbid, while peering around you at a frozen Citi Field, perhaps accompanied by a luckless dog who was wondering what he/she did wrong to be kept outside and risk dying of exposure.

(Because I’m thinking of it and I get to write this stuff, in the British Royal Navy the dog watch was one of two back-to-back two-hour watches, half the usual time on duty; there’s a shameless joke in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books in which a character posits that dog watches got their name because they’re curtailed.)

You could all but sense the cold leaking through your TV screen. After two games marked by hardy fans and surprisingly robust attendance, the Mets played the Marlins in front of basically nobody, meaning auditory cameos for the fans counting down along the pitch clock as an attempted psych-out (this can stop now, thanks) as well as those miscellaneously exhorting or lamenting the goings-on. Though for long stretches you basically heard nothing at all. (Not even barking, which was for the best.)

The Mets won, 2-0, which was wonderful. But the game felt not so much crisp and taut as sort of wandery and desultory, as if it was less being won or preparing to be lost than it was simply transpiring. It seemed thoroughly appropriate that around the two-thirds point the Mets decided games like this were a bad idea, moving Tuesday’s night game up to 4:10 pm ahead of Wednesday’s matinee, with vouchers for ticket holders regardless of whether their reaction to the change was disgruntlement or delight. (Nice touch, that.)

Not that it promises to be balmy at 6:30 pm tomorrow, but the schedule tweak will give New York’s nights another week and change to warm up, with hopes that April 17’s evening affair against the Cardinals will be a little more pleasant for spectating.

As for the wandery/desultory baseball part, the Mets once again won using a recipe we didn’t expect: Going into the season, we figured the bull case was that they’d get so-so starting pitching and relief and bash their way past these limitations a fair amount of the time. Instead it’s been the opposite: So far the Mets have pitched almost immaculately, particularly in relief, while hitting just enough to make those performances stand up.

So it was tonight: Juan Soto drove in one run and Tyrone Taylor drove in the other, the latter engineered almost entirely by the hell-for-leather speed of Jose Siri from second base. Meanwhile Kodai Senga pitched well and was followed capably by Danny Young (the lone reliever with a spotty record so far, but good this time out), Jose Butto and impressive-looking closer for a day Ryne Stanek.

Baseball being baseball, one would expect this to change, and pretty soon. Wait a week or so and I wouldn’t be surprised to find us bemoaning the struggles of some reliever or another and waiting for good news about Sean Manaea‘s return, while appreciating that the bats are finally awake and keeping us in these games. You could see signs of that Tuesday night, in fact, provided you could open your frozen eyelids: Pete Alonso had another night of jeweller’s-eye ABs and Francisco Lindor saw ball after ball drop in, while Soto seemed more comfortable at the plate and Mark Vientos no longer looked like he was holding his bats the wrong way up.

There’s no markdown on wins that don’t follow the formula, of course. The Mets won; they’ve won five in a row; and they’re welcome to beat the Marlins twice more before heading out to West Sacramento. Should they do so I won’t fret that either score was 1-0 and not 14-2, provided the NYM winds up on the left. And then when we see the Mets again perhaps it can be warm.