Mood-Altering Wins

I followed Thursday afternoon’s game from Citi Field as much as I possibly could, and it followed me almost but not fully everywhere I had to go. Thursday afternoons can be uncooperative that way. I had TV at the beginning and end, radio on and off in the middle, and pitches missed here and there. My attention was focused no more than three-quarters Metwise at any given moment. That’s an estimate; Statcast doesn’t measure fan focus, but give them time. Despite gaps, I was able to discern that the Mets and the Rays clung close to one another all day. Had my attention pierced the 90% mark, I might call the game tense, but I was partly distracted; fairly content that the sun was out; and, mostly, not convinced the Mets would eventually lose. That state of affairs on its own merits depleted for me some of the tension from a matchup whose margin never exceeded one run. As a Mets fan, I was simply happy not being unhappy.

If that’s not a sea change, it’s a least a tidal shift. For several weeks until the late innings Wednesday night, Mets games proceeded mostly on a doom course. They’d lost 16 of 22. Few of the sixteen losses as they unfolded seemed surprising. Almost all of the six wins came off as aberrations. Even going back to the smugger beginnings of the season, including the spurt when we collected 11 Ws in 14 attempts, I was increasingly overcome by something being no less than slightly off about this team. A virtual pie to the face to the first person who haughtily sees fit to remind me that all wins are good wins. You didn’t have to graduate first grade to comprehend all wins are preferable to all losses, yet there were wins in whose fabric flaws are noticeable and nagging. I keep going back to the Saturday (3-2) and Sunday (4-3) of the sweep in Oakland and the conviction I developed that weekend that if we’d been playing anybody better than the consensus pick for worst team in baseball, we could have been had. Soon, we’d be playing a string of teams considered barely a notch above the A’s, and the whole assortment of presumed also-rans tangled us in knots.

What it says when the Mets, after stumbling successively at the hands of the Tigers, the Rockies, the Reds and the Nats, were thrown into competition versus the consensus best team in baseball and, eventually, got the best of the best I’m not as sure. The Rays made the Mets look as bad Tuesday night as the Nationals made the Mets look Monday afternoon. A lot of bad had been going around and it didn’t ask to see anybody’s record as it descended on the House of Not So Amazin’. The Mets, behind Kodai Senga on the mound and the Rays on the scoreboard, didn’t look bad Wednesday night so much as destined to be outlasted. Senga pitched great, yet the Rays kept finding ways to edge ahead. Then here came the latest iteration of the Youth of America, clutch Mark Vientos and even clutcher Francisco Alvarez, and suddenly we were in fugazi extra innings, and a Rays run scored easy-peasy, and the best team in baseball was positioned to inflict upon us one of the least appealing consolation prizes a professional sports team of whom much was expected can receive: a moral victory. No, we didn’t beat the mighty Rays, you could hear it reasoned, but the kids came up big and it took ten before we went down for the count.

As one imagines Pete Alonso would put it with characteristic eloquence, fuck moral victories. With a synthetic runner (Brandon Nimmo) on third and a real one (Jeff McNeil, by way of a single to right rather than a baseball-hating commissioner’s bright idea) on first, Alonso sent a Pete Fairbanks pitch to somewhere near Anchorage, and, as you know, we won, 8-7. Without Pete’s explicit power, maybe we lose, 7-5. Or maybe they lose, 7-5. Pronouns can be tricky when you don’t necessarily wish to identify with a particular result.

What Wednesday night’s triumph accomplished, beyond one win, was to make Thursday the kind of game when, no matter what percentage of attention you directed toward it in amid the contours of an afternoon, mentally tenable. It helped that the slight hole the Mets dug for themselves in the top of the first (they sure love to dig first-inning holes) wasn’t deep and it was instantly excavated in the bottom of the first. The two teams traded a run apiece. The two starters, Tylor Megill for our side, Taj Bradley for theirs, settled in. I knew nothing about Taj Bradley going in. I knew Megill as well as one could from three seasons of intermittent pitching as a guy we use mainly because somebody else isn’t available. I know that he can, from time to time, provide an island of stability for a staff in disarray. Tylor was all that on April 12, when he went five solid innings and gave up but two runs to the Padres in a hypercompetent 5-2 win at Citi Field.

That game was the thirteenth the Mets played in 2023. The season’s ensuing episodes have since, like Terence Mann’s evocation of America in Field of Dreams, rolled by like an army of steamrollers. As of April 12, the Mets had yet to make that ten-game trip to the West Coast, Max Scherzer had yet to be suspended for sweat and rosin, Justin Verlander had yet to make a single start and the ballclub had yet to utterly lose its way. As of April 12, the Mets were 7-6, clearing their throats en route to announcing they were a week and change from catapulting to 14-7. It was the day I figured the Mets were now the Mets and everything was gonna be fine. It was the last time I allowed myself to feel the slightest bit smug about our projected powerhouse of a surefire contender. It was the last time I thought Tylor Megill was an unalloyed asset to the rotation.

Until Thursday. Megill going six against the Rays and giving up two runs was the main reason for feeling good about Megill. The Mets withstanding the Rays on all fronts seeded the environment for greater satisfaction. Because of how they played Wednesday — because of how they finished Wednesday (not just in the tenth, but within the thunderbolt swings of the seventh and the ninth) — I had the sense I was watching/listening to a different team from the one that had sapped the enthusiasm out of the season for most of the past month. Maybe we won’t win, I thought, but it won’t because we so readily allow the worst in us to come out at the slightest tap. Better yet, maybe we won’t lose, regardless that these are the Rays, and for all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday we were made to understood what that meant.

The Rays of Thursday were pretty good, too, but so were our Mets. Their first-inning run was met by our first-inning run. Their next run, in the sixth, served only to match the one Pete put up all by his lonesome in fourth. The Rays’ response, via Josh Lowe’s solo homer, tied the game at two, but it didn’t severely damage our chances in the interim. Megill hung tough enough, and the Mets, à la the Fabulous Thunderbirds, still maintained a chance to wrap it up.

In the bottom of the sixth, as in the bottom of the first, the Mets scratched out a run, this one to put them/us ahead, 3-2. It’s the Alonso blasts to the heavens and the Vientos and Alvarez breakthroughs that you remember, but it’s the simple little rally tally that can make all the difference. Alonso’s non-homer batting average is .152. Be glad that Pete leads the world in home runs with 16. Be thrilled that once in a while his teammates, young and less young, go deep. (The thrill of a non-Pete Met homer being so rare helps explain why track-record slugger/tin glove catcher Gary Sanchez is coming up, presumably at the expense of Michael Perez, who merely instigated the final defensive out of the top of the sixth with a heady pickoff throw to first.) But danged, as Pete likely wouldn’t say, if three singles stitched together by McNeil, Baty and Pham — none of them calling for the kind of Statcast tape-measuring Alonso’s hits require — don’t also sometime get the job done.

Same for three innings of unglamorous but mostly effective relief pitching, this time around from Brooks Raley, Jeff Brigham and David Robertson. Tampa Bay put a runner on first in the eighth and another runner on second in the ninth. I was prepared for the dang dam to burst at any given moment, with Rays runs swimming everywhere, but I was just as prepared to stay dry. Each arm did what it was asked to do. No Ray scored after the sixth. The Mets had just won two in a row.

The standings tell us almost nothing definitive other than they contain only 45 games played for the Mets to this point. The “race’ for the final NL Wild Card involves literally everybody who isn’t already clutching a playoff spot in the mythical if the season ended today… derby. Miami, in what amounts to first place for Berth No. 6, is five games ahead of eleventh-place Washington. Washington’s probably not going to get hotter than ten other clubs and become the third Wild Card in the league, but you can’t tell the Nationals to go home and get their shine box on May 19. Nobody’s out of it yet. That, blessedly, includes us. We’re 22-23. It would be nice if we could keep adjusting the first column upward and limit the rise of the second. Nice for now is a return to actually believing such a Met-friendly trajectory is more than possible.

This is where, if the season was in further progress and straits had just grown slightly less dire from two encouraging victories, we might declare, YOU GOTTA BELIEVE! Too early for that in 2023, but not too early to pay tribute to the 50th anniversary of the season when both our lexicon and our flagpole was enhanced forever. Revisit the pennant-winning campaign of 1973 as part of the It Happens in Threes series on the newest episode of National League Town.