The Slog

Sunday was another at least mildly notable first for the still-young 2023 season, and unfortunately I’m not referring to the sophomore-year debut of Francisco Alvarez. Our catcher of the future went one for four, with the one a dunker of an RBI single, while making some good throws to second and one bad one. One of the good ones would have counted as a caught stealing except Rob Manfred and his less than merry band of MBAs tinkered with the replay rules as well as more important things, leaving with the Mets without sufficient time to determine that a challenge would have been fruitful. The bad one went on the books as the Mets’ first error of 2023, an inevitability that still led to muttering.

But Alvarez’s performance isn’t the first under discussion here; rather, it was that Sunday’s game was the first of the season that left you thinking that there must have been a better use of your now-vanished afternoon. It was a slog, wandering spiritually between annoying and dismaying, with the Mets not truly out of it until the seventh but never giving you much of a hint that they were about to get back into it.

The biggest issue — assuming Starling Marte suffered nothing more than a neck strain in a collision at third — was Carlos Carrasco being terrible for a second straight start. This time out Carrasco had no problems with the pitch clock or recuperation between innings; rather, it was that his key pitches were MIA. His slider kept ambling into the middle of the strike zone, he had no feel for the splitter, and the fastball was missing a couple of ticks of much-needed velocity. To no one’s surprise he got lit up; the big blows were homers from Bryan De La Cruz and Garrett Cooper, but pretty much every Marlin ball put in play was hit hard. Carrasco is an innings eater, not an ace, but there’s eating innings and there’s making such a mess at the table that everyone else abandons the meal in disgust.

Still, an important reminder. It’s natural as fans to ascribe every win to the home nine’s diligent preparation and oorah gumption while chalking up every loss to those same players’ blundering and moral failures. It’s also nonsense. The other guys are trying too, and sometimes it works out better for them than it does for the protagonists. The Marlins played much tighter defense than we’ve seen from them of late and got the big hits when they needed them; the Mets collected nine hits but their sequencing was garbage, which is more bad luck than anything else. It happens, and while it’s not the best way to spend an early spring afternoon, a Just So story that makes more out of it than that is just compounding time wasted.

The Mets will now somehow not see the Marlins again until September, which seems like a relief in that the Marlins are horrible but might not be ideal for the W-L record given that the Marlins are horrible. Instead, the Mets will now entertain the Padres, which definitely feels like a case of Too Soon, right down to a repeat of the ill-fated Game 1 matchup between Max Scherzer and Yu Darvish. That’s not quite as cruel as the Mets having to open the 2016 season against the Royals, perhaps the unhappiest bit of scheduling roulette I can recall from nearly a half-century of fandom, but it definitely counts as a party for which you’d have preferred not to receive an invitation.