A day after Monday night’s freeze-fest, the Mets played a game that had been moved to Tuesday daylight hours and yet somehow took place in even less pleasant conditions. (They closed the Promenade, which ought to tell you something.) That verdict was clear pretty much from the jump: Clay Holmes [1]‘ third pitch of the afternoon was a sweeper that Xavier Edwards [2] popped to right field, a harmless fly ball until it took a videogame cheat-code swerve, plummeting to the ground out of reach of a befuddled Juan Soto [3]. Holmes, perhaps understandably out of sorts, lost his command late in the inning and walked off the mound down 2-0. But about a split-second later Francisco Lindor [4] rifled a Connor Gillispie [5] cutter into Soda Land, cutting the Marlins’ early lead in half, and you had the feeling no pitcher was particularly enamoured with the idea of plying one’s trade out there in the wind and the cold.
Holmes’ first weeks in a Mets uniform have been a trifle odd: He looked electric in spring training, then tentative the moment the games counted. (Somewhere, Brett Baty [6] looks around nervously.) Tuesday’s game looked like more of the same in the early going, with Holmes feeling his way, but he figured something out in an electric fourth inning, starting a run that sustained him until he appeared to tire in the sixth.
Meanwhile, the Mets got their own meteorological assist: With Soto on first in the third with two out, Pete Alonso [7] popped up a ball that the wind made its plaything, plopping down just inside the line for a Texas Leaguer double, one that scored Soto on account of it having been in the air for about half an hour. That was a harbinger of the Mets finally [8] looking like the Mets of preseason predictions, outhitting a so-so day for the moundsmen. (Told you [9]!) Brandon Nimmo [10] and Starling Marte [11] keyed a four-run fifth, only to watch Huascar Brazoban [12] give three runs back in his first shaky outing of the year, with Derek Hill [13]‘s home run the key blow. Hill later contributed a circus catch to take three RBIs away from Tyrone Taylor [14], though that one gets an asterisk because he was positioned absurdly, about which more in a bit.
The Mets extended their lead convincingly in the sixth, a frame that led you to wonder what, exactly, the Marlins were doing out there. Amusingly, it wasn’t Keith Hernandez [15] who blew his stack watching the circus in need of a tent but Gary Cohen, who was indignant and properly so. Why did the Marlins walk Soto in front of Alonso, when they’d seen four and a half games’ worth of evidence that Soto isn’t quite right at the plate while Alonso is locked in? Why, having walked Alonso to set up a double play, did they then play the infield in? Why did Pete bat with the Marlin outfielders positioned like they were trying to prevent an extra-inning walkoff tie? Why doesn’t first-year skipper Clayton McCullough [16] have an experienced bench coach to ask these questions in time? Why is McCullough dressed like a guy who’ll dig your car out of the snow in return for a few bills?
(Oh sorry, that last one was my question. But still.)
Cohen was right about all of the above; they’re not the kind of questions one would expect to hear posited by an enemy announcer in the third week of the season. Though I suppose my rejoinder would be that Marlins have always been and always will be a shabby outfit that a benevolent God wouldn’t allow to exist, which makes any other questions about them irrelevant.
Honestly, between spring training and the start of the year we’ve seen way too much of the Marlins. Win or lose, after Wednesday’s matinee we won’t have to look at them again until late August, when Sandy Alcantara [17] will be employed elsewhere (possibly even by us!) and they’ll be even more low-rent and anonymous than they are now. Suffice it to say I won’t miss them.
* * *
Octavio Dotel [18] was never a Marlin, which is a bet I would have probably lost, since Dotel’s 15-year career saw him ply his trade as an Astro, Athletic, Yankee, Royal, Brave, White Sock, Pirate, Dodger, Rockie, Blue Jay, Cardinal and Tiger — a record for franchise portability that would stand until Edwin Jackson [19] proved slightly more well-traveled. (Dotel got off a good line that Jackson’s longer CV shouldn’t count because he kept getting released.)
And he was a Met, of course, starting his career with us in 1999, a tour that ended with Dotel as the winning pitcher when Robin Ventura [20] hit one back to Georgia. The game I remember most from his brief tenure, though, came in August against the Padres, one of those hold-your-eyelids-open-with-toothpicks West Coast games that you resent even before they start.
There was Dotel out there in only his ninth big-league start, one that saw him arrive with an ERA near six and the burden of having just been roughed up by those same Padres five days earlier at Shea. But Dotel had something that night, and when he struck out the side in the third, not having allowed a hit, I let myself get excited. There he was, a doe-eyed stringbean, but he was throwing gas and you could see his confidence growing with each out recorded.
Dotel got through the fourth without a blemish and then the fifth and then the sixth, and despite 30 years on Earth having taught me better, as he went to work in the seventh I was certain: Octavio Dotel was going to throw the first no-hitter in Mets history, and nobody was going to witness it because who would stay up late to watch a rookie face the same team that had just tattooed him? Should I wake up Emily? Call everyone I know? Go out in the backyard and yell for the neighbors to turn on their TVs?
In the seventh it all became academic: Dotel walked Tony Gwynn [21], walked John Vander Wal [22], and then Phil Nevin [23] hit a three-run homer that took away the no-hitter and the lead with one swing. (Don’t worry, it turned out [24] OK: Edgardo Alfonzo [25] hit a 10th-inning homer off Will Cunnane [26] and Armando Benitez [27] didn’t blow the save.)
Dotel was traded to Houston after that first year with the Mets in the deal for Mike Hampton [28] and Derek Bell [29] (whom I’ll always remember chose to live on his boat), and somehow he never came back to the Mets even though he went almost everywhere else. I was always happy to see him on the mound in the late innings for somebody, an unlikely journey that started out with him being ours and ended with him feeling like he was everybody’s [30].