Attention Must Be Sort of Paid

It’s a nice enough Sunday, the Mets game from Pittsburgh is on, I’m happy to be tuned in even if I’m only sort of paying attention to the Mets trailing the Pirates. I see Luis Guillorme called out on strikes because he was a second or so late in facing the pitcher with the count one-and-two, a ticky-tack rule rigorously enforced by umpires who don’t want their asses plopped into jackpots. That’s how baseball works in 2023. Get these games over with as soon as possible, every second counts. I’m thinking maybe Luis forgot about these MLB adjustments during his exile to Syracuse, or perhaps his ever-impressive beard inadvertently served as clock-blocker.

Next half-inning, still sort of paying attention, I hear Gary Cohen sum up the defensive changes Buck Showalter has made. Mark Canha is now playing first base, Jeff McNeil is in right field and Guillorme is at second. “Where was Guillorme playing before? Was he at short? At third?” None of that sounded correct. I consulted an in-progress box score. Francisco Lindor was the shortstop all day. He was the DH the day before, but he’s the shortstop every day. Brett Baty I was pretty sure was the third baseman. Yup, still was. Then I divined Guillorme had entered the game the previous half-inning as a pinch-hitter for Mark Vientos and his .167 batting average. You might want somebody to bat for young Mark if your confidence in the kid has sagged sufficiently. But Guillorme? Really? I foggily recalled from a few minutes earlier that the Pirates had made a pitching change, thus Buck must have responded in kind, Guillorme the lefty for Vientos the righty versus whoever the reliever was.

Guillorme as pinch-hitter? I mulled. He was asked to lead off the Mets’ most recent half-inning. In that situation, you just want somebody to find his way on base, so I guess it wasn’t altogether crazy to send up a guy who had hit so little before his mid-May demotion that his bat wasn’t once missed during his absence. It’s not like Luis, recalled on Friday, has never gotten on base. We know he can work counts by fouling off legendary quantities of pitches. He is, as Keith Hernandez likes to intone with assurance, “a veteran”. Luis generally knows what he’s doing. It just didn’t pan out, neither the plate appearance nor the knowing what he’s doing vis-à-vis the pitch clock. A year ago, Luis was a heady, clutch contributor and Buck’s calls were mostly golden.

Me, I was only sort of paying attention. I could complain about what the Mets seem incapable of doing these days, but I seem to have at least temporarily lost my ability to hang on every pitch. Perhaps I should try sweat and rosin to regain my grip. I knew the game was coasting along without much Met success. I knew McNeil had homered. I knew nobody else on our side had done anything remotely like that. I knew Carlos Carrasco didn’t last quite long enough. I knew Josh Walker had gotten out of Carrasco’s jam and further acquitted himself well in the next inning, and that Drew Smith stopped giving up home runs. I knew Andrew McCutchen had collected his 2,000th career hit, and that as long as it didn’t drive home any other Pirate or a lead to any other Pirate driving him home, good for him. I knew Mitch Keller had thrown a gem for however long he threw it, thanks to a) being conscious that Keller is having a heckuva year for the Buccos; and b) being hyperconscious that Keller was the guy who hit Starling Marte last September and effectively shortsheeted our offense for the duration of 2022. It took a second trip through the batting order for me to question if I’d seen Marte in the game. I was certain I would have noticed a Marte-Keller rematch. I checked that in-game box score to confirm…no, Starling had the day off. Like I said, I was sort of paying attention.

I knew we were losing, 2-1. I didn’t know we were going to lose, 2-1, but I rather suspected it, partly because of what I could glean from what I had managed to notice, partly from the tenor of the week-plus that had just passed. The Mets had lost seven in a row, then won one, now were trying to not lose anew. I had written up five of the seven losses. Maybe the cumulative losing had taken a toll on my attention by Sunday, despite the win on Saturday. I delved into Baseball-Reference and determined that since we began Faith and Fear in Flushing, the Mets have lost seven or more in a row seven times: once in 2011 (in April, undermining our confidence at the dawn of what became the Terry Collins Era); once in 2015 (more than a month prior to our salvation via Cespedes); once in 2017 (when things had grown so chippy around here that Jason and I turned off the comments section for the entirety of a road trip); twice in 2018 (an eight-gamer that ran through June 9 and a seven-game version that commenced June 19; fun times); once in 2019 (when I had the rare pleasure of recording for blog posterity each of the seven consecutive defeats); and the one we just endured in 2023. What all those dips into the abyss had in common is we treated them, after it became apparent the losing had reached streak proportions, as if they would never end and, after sucking up as much sucking as we could, acted as if we couldn’t bear to continue paying attention to the team doing the losing. Then a win would occur and attention would be paid, at first sort of, eventually at an extent approaching full engagement. That’s how a blog lasts nineteen seasons and counting. That’s how lifelong fandom earns its adjective.

The longest Met losing streak I ever experienced as a fan was in August of 1982: 15 games. It started while I was winding down the summer interregnum between my freshman and sophomore years of college. It continued during my rushed packing and thousand-odd mile drive south. It didn’t conclude until classes were in session. It was easier in 1982 to no more than sort of pay attention. By the time I was back in school, far from New York in the pre-Internet age, all I had was the next morning’s paper. They lost again. Damn. Oh well. If George Bamberger made a questionable move with a pinch-hitter, it happened without as much as peripheral awareness from me. The 1982 Mets finished in last place, 32 games under .500, 27 games out of first. I was as discouraged as I’d ever been since I’d begun watching, listening to, reading about and obsessing over the Mets in 1969, yet my attention rose to its standard status of full-mast when 1983 rolled around. I was barely older then than this blog is now and had never committed myself to write more than a composition or a book report about the Mets.

The new rules say a pitcher trying to pick a runner off base without himself courting an automatic balk can only disengage twice. I guess it doesn’t hurt for a fan to try it at least once in a while.

After the inning Canha moved to first, McNeil to right and Guillorme to second — none of which mattered, as Brooks Raley walked one and struck out three — Tommy Pham doubled with one out. He was the tying run on base, which was great. Pham doing something of an extra-base nature…I was wary. Pham seems to light it up most in Met losses. Coincidence, I’m sure, but you tend to infer what you begin to sense are trendlets. Another trip to Baseball-Reference is booked to ascertain if Pham the Met hits his best in games that become losses is something akin to a trend or just a figment of the selective imagination.

Pham HRs in Met wins: 2
Pham HRs in Met losses: 4

Pham RBIs in Met wins: 7
Pham RBIs in Met losses: 15

Pham total bases in Met wins: 21
Pham total bases in Met losses: 35

Absolutely coincidental. I’d rather have Tommy Pham getting big hits and take my chances that a teammate will follow in kind than subscribe to voodoo that suggests a Pham double represents a season ticket to Doomsville. Still, it’s kind of eerie. I guess I’ve been paying enough attention to notice Met quirks if not who among Mets is playing in a given inning.

Pham on second, one out, David Bednar pitching. The inning, by the way, is the ninth. It’s the Mets’ last chance. The game has coasted, but now it may be crashing. Gary is telling me how good a closer Bednar is. I actually knew that. I remember he was the Pirates’ lone All-Star last year, a solitary status well-deserved based on what I watched last September when I was paying close attention daily. I may have never seen a more fundamentally lacking ballcub than I did when the Pirates stumbled into Citi Field in 2022. They’ve certainly tightened up their act since then. They’re in first place in their division, and they’ve got a better record than we do, though the latter distinction hardly implies membership within an exclusive society. Bednar, who threw a lot of pitches to get some work in during Friday night’s blowout win for them, has Pham on second. He’s facing Baty, with Canha on deck. Either one would be the right person to knock Pham home. Baty’s run hot and cold, but can’t you picture his game-tying line drive and him landing on first base clapping hard and the Mets dugout going suitably nuts for his having rescued them from a series loss? I could. Alas, it was only in my mind. Baty flied out.

Then Canha, who would have made for a gratifying hero as well. Canha, who got off to a molasses start in this sped-up season, but has begun to produce. Canha, who we know can take it to one of the Pennsylvania teams from the way he beats Philly silly, so why not both (Canha’s BA versus PHI and PIT: .438; Canha’s BA versus all others: .227)? Canha, who had half of the Mets’ hits between the first inning and the eighth inning, a fact I half-recalled from the attention I had sort of paid this game. Canha, who suddenly plays first base much of the time because the Met who plays first base all of the time, Pete Alonso, is unavailable for the immediate future after he absorbed a pitch on the wrist in Atlanta. You just hope the effect of Alonso’s absence this year isn’t akin to the effect of Marte’s absence last year. Hope is one of those elements that is not rules- or health-dependent. You can have all you want, assuming you can generate it in the aftermath of a seven-game losing streak.

I had semi-sincere hope that Canha would come through and drive in Pham. As with Baty, I could picture it happening. A double in the gap, I decided. Pham scores easily. Canha shouting something triumphant while standing on second. Gary declaring that with the Mets down to their last out, it is Mark Canha, the key to their Keystone State fortunes, who keeps them alive, except Gary would declare it better than that because he’s a Hall of Fame broadcaster.

Usually I resist envisioning what’s going to happen because, unlike my hunch about Pham totaling most his bases in Met losses proving accurate, my percentage as prognosticator, particularly as it syncs to the Mets winning, is lower than Mark Vientos’s batting average. Clearing my mind of possibilities is the best way for me to proceed in the ninth inning. Maybe Canha would get that base hit. Maybe he wouldn’t.

He didn’t. The Mets lost, 2-1. They had three hits in total: Canha’s single in the second, McNeil’s homer in the fourth, Pham’s double in the ninth. It was still a nice Sunday. For me, not the Mets. We do lead separate lives sometimes. I left the game on until it became the postgame, I half-listened to Buck frame the Mets’ eighth defeat in their past nine games, though I must confess that I retained none of what he said five seconds after he said it, and then I told my wife, sure, put in the movie. Netflix’s DVD-rental service is going out of business, so we’re trying to watch as many unstreamable titles as we can before they shut it down in September. I’m also trying to watch as many Mets games as I can before the Mets shut it down in September — in case that’s their plan. I tend to make movie time wait on the Mets. I don’t know how long that plan will remain the rule.

Entering the series at PNC Park, I reasoned the Mets were a few games from a playoff spot with 99 games to play, and that’s the bottom line, no matter the sputtering that’s kept them from reaching the sunnier side of that bottom line. It’s three games later. They’re just as far off the pace, though with some extra teams crowding them out of more encouraging positioning. Ninety-six games remain. The Mets are still around. Maybe they’ll start playing better and move up. Maybe they won’t. I look forward to paying attention. Sort of.