Here's to Getting Over It

Forty-two pitches into his Mets debut, Kodai Senga was in trouble.

Our Japanese import, a feel-good story across that far bigger pond for rising from developmental player (the closest equivalent is “low-A cannon fodder”) to three-time All-Star with five rings, had needed 36 pitches just to get through the first against the Marlins: A single, an RBI double, a walk and another walk preceded a pair of strikeouts and a sharp line drive corralled by Starling Marte. Senga had a 2-1 lead because Trevor Rogers was being tortured by the Mets and by his own defense, but to say things looked dicey was to understate it. Senga was clearly nervous, which was playing havoc with his location, threatening to send a whole line of dominos toppling in ways not to our liking.

Things didn’t start off much better in the second, as Senga began by walking Jacob Stallings — the third guy he’d walked in the first eight batters faced. The next batter was Joey Wendle, and this time ball one was automatic — a pitch-clock violation, of all things. (It’s not visible in the ESPN play by play, but trust me, it happened.)

You didn’t have to be a scarred and calloused Metsian doomsayer to imagine what might happen next: another rough inning, an early departure with the Mets now down 4-2 or 5-2, and lots of shots of Senga trying to look stoic in the dugout but mostly just looking glum. After the game Buck Showalter would be calm and philosophical, teammates would say the right things, and Senga would offer some variation on it being good to get the first one out of the way and how he’d be making adjustments and that of course what he was most looking forward to was taking the ball again in five days’ time.

Except that wasn’t what happened at all.

Having given Wendle a free ball one, Senga sent a fastball through the lower reaches of the strike zone to even the count. Another fastball clipped the bottom of the zone to put him up 1-2. Next came the ghost fork or the splitter, depending on how romantic one feels about naming Senga’s much-hyped out pitch. Wendle slapped it harmlessly to center for an out. Two pitches later, Senga coaxed a double-play ball to retire the seemingly unretireable Luis Arraez and he was out of the inning. Out of the inning and, as it turned out, home free. He worked into the sixth, baffling the Marlins with ghost forks and fastballs and sweepers, with the lone blemish an Arraez single in the fifth. Eighty-eight pitches, just one run allowed, and no reason for Showalter to have to be placid and soothing? That will work.

Senga was only half of the Mets’ story, though. The other half was Tommy Pham, who was 3-for-4 with three RBIs, two of them on a fifth-inning homer off whatever that white corporate structure out there is beyond the Soilmaster Stadium fence. Pham has a genetic condition called keratoconus, in which the collagen in the cornea thins and can develop a vision-impairing bulge. (Amazing the ailments one learns about as a Mets fan — if it ain’t Valley fever it’s spinal stenosis.) Pham has dealt with the condition since 2008; on Friday he got new contact lenses from his Florida-based eye doctor, praising the results as “way different in a good way.”

Pham is the 2023 Met I feel like I know the least about — when he arrived as a fourth outfielder/potential piece of the DH puzzle, my recollection of him was a blur of long-ago Cardinals moments, slapping Joc Pederson over fantasy football and a reputation for being, shall we say, a little edgy. That last part may be true, though I came away from this 2018 Sports Illustrated feature about Pham thinking that a) he’s a complicated cat in an interesting way; and b) some of that running hot seems pretty understandable. If Pham has a run of performances like Sunday’s, we’ll all know a lot more about keratoconus and perhaps even find ourselves advocates for finding reasons to slap Joc Pederson — nothing like winning to make you see things way different.

The rest of it? Jazz Chisholm Jr. made another horrific misplay in center, making you wonder (and not for the first time) if setting up their best player to fail wasn’t exactly the greatest plan, even by Miami Marlins standards. Avisail Garcia, meanwhile, managed to get himself called out on a pitch-clock violation and looked at a third-strike fastball down the middle from Stephen Nogosek when the fastball was rather obviously the only pitch Nogosek was able to throw for a strike. That kind of serial dopiness has been a Marlins fixture in recent years, an unwelcome distraction for a franchise that too often can’t seem to get out of its own way. Marlins fans deserve better — I’ve always felt for them despite being steadfast in my belief that their team is a not particularly funny nihilistic joke — but in the zero-sum game of baseball, we’ll of course take every mistake our opponents care to make.

A last observation, one I’ll count as pencilled in for now: In theory I don’t mind the idea of baseball games not routinely zooming past three hours in duration, but so far the pitch clock has thrown off my own rhythms as a fan in ways I find disconcerting. Decades of fandom have given me a pretty sound sense of how long routine things take, letting me know — for instance — how many seconds it’ll take a hitter who just fouled a mistake pitch straight back to spin out of the box, collect himself, exhale, kick at the dirt a little and then return to duty. But now I need to recalibrate all that. I watched the end of Saturday’s game in a bar with no sound and missed Francisco Lindor‘s double — not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because my internal clock was off.

I’m sure I’ll get used to this, and probably sooner than I think, but right now it’s left me pretty unhappy. Rob Manfred and his merry band of consultants have decried many baseball changes of relatively recent vintage, but it strikes me as a rich irony that their answer to these supposedly ruinous changes has been a blizzard of changes to things a lot more fundamental, including basics of the game I would have thought sacrosanct.