The Other Guys Are Trying to Win, Too

To be fair, it’s only natural: As fans, we see everything through a certain-colored lens, in our case one split between blue and orange.

So let’s peer through it and see what’s what: Marcus Stroman was throttling the Diamondbacks, the Mets had the lead, and then everything went south. A minor but chippy on-field dustup between Stro and Josh Rojas looked like a pointless gesture from a team on a 1-15 streak, as Francisco Lindor tripled in a run to make it 3-0 Mets and Dom Smith just missed a three-run homer which would have been his second of the game. But he did miss it, and had to settle for a sacrifice fly. 4-0 seemed like more than enough, but a three-run blast by Pavin Smith that got Arizona back in the game, with Smith’s bat flip indicating a certain degree of unhappiness with the opposition. (I don’t mind bat flips in the least, but that one felt like it had an agenda.) Jeurys Familia shook off a leadoff two-base error from Jonathan Villar to keep the Diamondbacks from tying it and Aaron Loup was terrific, but Edwin Diaz looked a little off from the jump in trying to secure the save. With one out, Nick Ahmed singled and took second base on a Billy McKinney bobble, then moved to third on a groundout. The Mets were one out away, but Rojas — of course it had to be Rojas — drove in the tying run. In the tenth the Mets immediately cashed their free runner on a James McCann double, but proved unable to convert their earned runner, and in the bottom of the inning Trevor May blew up for the second night in a row: walk, two-run double, farcical replay review, ballgame.

That’s a chronicle of the Mets riling up sleeping snakes, failing to add to a lead and seeing their bullpen falter, and seeing that way is perfectly accurate. I’m a Mets fan, after all. And more than that, I’m a Mets fan who finds the Diamondbacks … annoying. There’s their ceaseless quest for the worst uniform in baseball — they’ve now settled on switching color schemes seemingly at random, and the rattlesnake with a baseball in its mouth looks more like a heart than a serpent, which you now won’t be able to unsee either. There’s their weirdly sterile park, their uncanny-valley mascot, their creepy on-field race with former players turned into caricatures, and hovering above it all the general sense that they were born as half of an expansion no one particularly needed. (Sure, they beat the Yankees once, and I’m grateful for that, but enemy of my enemy etc.) I don’t hate the Diamondbacks, because that would require me to take them more seriously than I ever have, but if they moved to Portland or Charlotte or Montreal or Vegas tomorrow I suspect I’d shrug and hope they actually became a franchise with an identity and one I’d feel something about.

But enough with the blue and orange lens. There are Diamondbacks fans, even if you wouldn’t know it from the cascade of pro-Mets noise the last two nights, and they’ve been through a lot in the last month, watching in horror as their team plummeted into one of those baseball abysses that makes you wonder if your team will ever win again.

I don’t know what colored lens those fans would look through, because it’s the Diamondbacks, but put it up to your eye and you’ll see a come-off-the-deck victory, the kind that doesn’t erase a horrific May but at least makes you fantasize about resilience and newfound toughness and all those baseball cliches and a better June. Rojas had had enough and let Stroman know it, Smith showed the kind of emotion you admire in a rookie, and the team came back and stared down a gang of first-place interlopers from the east, shocking them with a walkoff loss.

As fans it’s of course all about us, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that perspective. But it’s not the only point of view. The other guys are trying to win too, and sometimes they do, and sometimes that’s as much the story as your own team’s failures.