Railway Companion

I turned on the Mets game a couple of minutes after my Metro-North train starting trundling south out of Waterbury, Conn., picking up the voices of Keith Raad and Pat McCarthy from distant West Sacramento. I switched trains in Bridgeport as old friend Luis Severino won an extended battle with Brett Baty even as he was losing the war against his own escalating pitch count. The Mets’ 8-0 win was deemed official shortly after I disembarked at Grand Central, sparing an admiring glance at the constellations overhead before heading downstairs to pick up a Shake Shack order, preparatory for the subway and home.

While I won’t claim this is science, and after 30 years of wifely pointers I reluctantly accept that everything shouldn’t be about me, I will note that a Waterbury-Grand Central train excursion turns out to be the perfect amount of time for a baseball game.

One of the many things I love about baseball is its elasticity. Paying close attention to every pitch will yield a deep storyline and insights to take with you into future games. But the game will still reward you if your attention wanders, needing periodic reminders about inning and score, and only snaps into focus for big moments. Baseball is an ideal companion no matter where you land on this spectrum on a given day, ready to be whatever you want and/or need it to be for the 150-odd minutes apportioned to it.

Sunday’s game occupied the part of the spectrum labeled “loyal companion; reminders needed.” In the early going I grasped that Severino was pitching a lot better than he had so far in his relatively new A’s career, using his sinker and sweeper to erase his old mates. But I also gathered that he was using up a lot of pitches to do so: In the first he needed a dozen to face Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto, retiring neither of them thanks to the first of a number of Oakland Sacramento Not Yet Las Vegas misplays, then 11 more to coax a double play from Pete Alonso. (Amazing how an 11-pitch AB from the Polar Bear no longer stands out!)

Severino calmed the waters in the second, with three called strikeouts accompanied by a first-pitch Luis Torrens single, and he was efficient in the third. But the fourth was a replay of the first: an extended set-to with Mark Vientos, the loss of Torrens to a walk, and Brett Baty digging in at the plate with two out and Brandon Nimmo on second as the potential first run of the game.

Baty hasn’t exactly gotten off to a rip-roaring start — perhaps you’ve heard — but has approached recent ABs with more conviction, and he hasn’t taken his offensive struggles out to the field with him. Starting at third on Sunday, he short-circuited an A’s rally in the second by kicking off a nifty around-the-horn double play, then turned that trick again an inning later. Kodai Senga hadn’t quite found his footing, so one imagines he was a grateful beneficiary.

In the fourth, Baty worked Severino to a 3-2 count and then played spoiler, fouling off a trio of pitches while I divided my attention between encouragement and checking if this arriving train was the one to bear me the rest of the way to New York. Severino erased Baty on a cutter above the hands and yowled in triumph as he left the mound, but I chose to accentuate the positive: Baty had held his own and the Not Yet Las Vegas bullpen was going to have work to do.

Meanwhile Senga had harnessed his ghost fork and started to carve up the A’s on his way to becoming the first Mets starter to go seven innings; Severino made it two-thirds of way through the sixth but could go no further, with his 103rd and last pitch spanked into right field by Torrens to score Alonso and give the Mets a 1-0 lead.

The roof then caved in on the bullpen: a Lindor RBI double, a bases-loaded walk on Vientos’ ledger (his second RBI of the year), a balk to bring home Tyrone Taylor, and then an ugly ninth in which the Athletic defense cratered and the Mets starting lashing balls all over Sutter Health, including a double from Vientos (three RBIs!) and a triple from Baty.

By then if I’d been watching on TV I would averted my eyes out of politeness; instead, I listened idly as Keith and Pat finished painting the word picture for me. They were pleasant and informative company, and have evolved from being individual complements for Howie Rose to finding a nice rapport as a duo. (Nothing against Howie whatsoever, but there’s also an amiable Teacher’s Not in the Classroom vibe to the pairing, which makes days without Howie more palatable.)

Ideally, announcers keep you anchored to the game while also giving your mind freedom to project and toy with what-ifs and dream a little. So it was with me as Max Kranick sent the A’s home and I traversed Grand Central: I was allowing myself to think that maybe, just maybe, Saturday marked when the worm had turned for both Vientos and Baty.

Vientos has established enough of a track record to have his struggles diagnosed as either an unfortunate product of small sample size or growing pains; Baty is teetering on the edge of being formally reclassified as suspect instead of prospect, with the next stop a reclassification as “somebody else’s project.” No one knows what will happen in either case — that narrative resumes tonight in Minnesota — but when you win by more than a touchdown, your eyes naturally turn to the bright side. Which is as it should be.