Next Victim — And It’s Not Us

In April, it didn’t merit our attention. In April, the Mets were the Mets who were going to make a habit of it. In April, the Mets beat the Padres one game, the A’s the next; the A’s one game, the Dodgers the next; and the Dodgers one game, the Giants the next. In April, the Mets would finish off one opponent, we’d shout “BRING ON THE NEXT VICTIM!” and the Mets would proceed as if they’d heard us.

That was April. This is June. April took place in another season. Before April ended, the Mets stopped beating most comers. In May, most comers took it to the Mets. There was a pause to the new, discouraging pattern in the middle of the month — two wins in a row to close out the Rays, then a sweep of the Guardians directly thereafter — and there were consecutive successful nights spanning a departure from Wrigleyville in Chicago and an arrival in the LoDo section of Denver, but otherwise, the Mets were having trouble holding the court. Somebody else always had next when it came to wins.

From May 27 through June 13, the Mets played fifteen games. They lost eleven of them. Three of the wins came in a row, all against one team, the Phillies. Another, versus the Pirates, floated alone in an ocean of defeats. Entering this season, you wouldn’t have thought you would get to the middle of June and have notice the Mets beat different opponents in back-to-back games only five times. But with the 2023 Mets, you learn to not count on what you were originally thinking.

Going into Friday night’s game, you might have thought the Mets got lucky to have as much as won one game in a row, their most recent, against the Yankees. They tried to sabotage themselves, they really did, but they pulled out Wednesday’s Subway Series finale despite themselves. Or maybe it was left on their doorstep and they had no choice but to pick it up. Whatever. A win was a win, and the Mets had one. So much for the commonly held belief that these Mets were never going to win another game in 2023.

Next inside Citi Field, after a blank day on the schedule, came the Cardinals. EEK! THE CARDINALS!! So much bad juju is associated with the Mets playing the Cardinals. And the existence of the Cardinals in general. If we just go on instinct, we assume the Cardinals have won most of the World Series the Yankees haven’t. Our instincts haven’t heard the Yankees haven’t won (or been in) a World Series since 2009, and that the mighty Cardinals have made a habit of being tripped up in postseasons since conjuring the last of their foolproof devil magic in 2011. We might not have noticed, since we were busy having our championship aspirations elbowed aside by the Padres, that the Cardinals pratfalled even harder versus the Phillies in the Wild Card round last year. We might have forgotten we took five of seven games versus St. Louis last year; it happened early, so our selective memory can be forgiven a little.

The St. Louis Cardinals of 2023 have fallen so far from their usual uppermost branch of the National League tree that even our Mets, struggling to flap their wings on any kind of consistent basis, have to look down to spot them. The Cardinals came into Citi Field with the worst record among all fifteen NL teams. As Gary Cohen reminded us twice during Friday’s telecast — a second time because it bore repeating — the Cardinals hadn’t finished a season with the worst record in the National League since 1918. There were fewer teams then. And a World War.

Yet, because we are Mets fans, we might have believed this was all an enormous setup, because they’re the Cardinals and we’re the Mets, and the Cardinals are forever our default worst-case scenario example, as in “we’ll release him, the Cardinals will sign him, and he’ll win 20 games/a batting title,” as if Jose Oquendo really did make it to Cooperstown. Belief in devil magic was capable of convincing us that the Cardinals would choose this trip to New York to remember that they are the Cardinals; remind us that they have appeared in four consecutive postseasons; and unnerve us with the additional credential that they haven’t missed the playoffs for more than three consecutive seasons in almost thirty years. And then you throw in 1985, 1987, 2006 and whatever individual bête noire that happens to flap to mind the moment you see Redbird red…

EEK! THE CARDINALS!!

But no, not so much at this juncture of 2023. While the Mets have not been very good, the Cardinals have been far more not very good, and they proved it Friday night in what became a quick and easy win for our guys. The Mets jumped on Miles Mikolas for three two-out runs in the first inning. Usually jumping on a pitcher for runs in the first inning implies fewer than two outs have been recorded, but the Mets needed to get a little futility out of their system with a bases-loaded, 1-2-3 double play from Francisco Lindor so we could all think the same thing: Here we go again. Our thinking, however, is consistently faulty this year. Instead of a golden opportunity going horribly tarnished, Brett Baty doubled home two runs, and maybe-not-bad luck charm Tommy Pham drove in another.

That provided a three-run cushion for Tylor Megill, the on again, off again starter who is rarely part of any grand rotational plan, but there he is, every fifth or so day, throwing the ball from the first inning until it becomes abundantly clear he shouldn’t be throwing it any longer. We brace for that moment to reveal itself by maybe the third, probably the fourth, definitely the fifth, and we expect whichever long reliever is tabbed to follow Tylor to have to hold down the deficit Megill has created.

Not Friday. Megill was locked in for the first four innings, negotiated a bit of havoc in the fifth inning, and then more or less sailed through the sixth. One run in six innings on seven strikeouts and no walks. Was Tylor that good or the Cardinals that bad? Did it matter? By the time Big Drip had soaked St. Louis, Lindor had compensated for his DP grounder by driving in a run with a sac fly RBI, and Pham once again brought a runner home. The Mets built a 5-1 lead ahead of Tylor’s final frame, and then made it 6-1 when presumed missing person Daniel Vogelbach reappeared as a DH who could hit, launching a very high home run toward the soft drink sign that glowed in rainbow colors for Pride Night. We could all feel proud as Daniel circled the bases.

Megill gave way to an inning of suddenly reliable righty Dominic Leone and two from emerging lefty option Josh Walker. Neither allowed much of anything to the visitors, and neither kept the hands of time impatiently tapping their fingers. The Mets required all of two hours and one minute to quell the Cards, 6-1. It was just one game, but it was one game we won after another game we won against a different opponent, the first instance of us knocking off a couple of “thems” in succession in three weeks. That the thems in question were the Yankees and the Cardinals can’t help but make the somewhat sustained success a skosh sweeter. There are some opponents against whom we tend to expect the worst. Let us therefore savor a couple of dollops of the best we could hope for.

A win versus somebody.
Then a win versus somebody else.
Who knew they would be such rare treats?