The Longest Third

Every season includes mathematical milestones that take me by surprise when I look up and notice them. Has this much of the season already flown by? It usually starts at the 16-game mark. We’re barely two weeks removed from Opening Day and, bam, 10% of the season has disappeared. We do this only fifteen more times and it’s over. Twenty games. Twenty-five games. A quarter. The halfway point. It melts away so fast.

Somewhere on the journey, the WHOOSH! slows down. By nature or specific circumstances, you realize everything is running right on time. Wow, this is the same season we were playing at the end of March. The ballological clock ticks with accuracy you couldn’t have fathomed mere months before.

We have now reached the two-thirds mark of this season, 108 games played, 54 games to go. If the last three games in Kansas City are any indicator, the last third of the 2023 season is going to run looong. We should know better than to wish away baseball, because as soon as we do, we’ll be counting down to Pitchers & Catchers, but if ever a season deserved to be nudged toward the door…

Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve had lots of those. Lots. But this one has made quite a spectacle of putting on its coat, grabbing whatever it still has from when it arrived, and announcing it really ought to get going.

The Mets are in the midst of something of a nostalgia tour. With their trip to Baltimore, they will have dropped by, in their last four road series, four of the five locales where they contested World Series as the visiting team, with “locales” standing in for ballparks since two of the parks (Memorial Stadium and the renovated version of Yankee Stadium) where we carried the National League flag into battle are no more in existence than the pennant-contending 2023 Mets. Interleague has diminished the cachet of the so-called World Series rematches that used to make trips to Fenway Park or the Oakland Coliseum a little more intriguing. Revisiting Kaufman Stadium for now the third time since 2015 elicited almost nothing wistful on my end. Salvador Perez is still lumbering to first base, but otherwise that crew is gone. Besides, there’s nothing about the current Royals or current Mets that suggests Fall Classic.

Though for three days, KC played like champs. Then again, look who they were playing.

The Thursday afternoon finale to one of the most outright depressing recent-vintage three-game sets I can recall wound up with a 9-2 defeat to a team that, judging solely by how they throttled the Mets, could have kept pace with the Willie Wilson- or Alcides Escobar-fueled successes of years past. Bobby Witt, Jr., is the real deal, and he was not alone out there. Of course we don’t care that much about the Royals now that we’re done being trampled by them. We didn’t care at all about them before we got there. That’s Interleague play for ya: three days of convincing yourself to get worked up over an opponent, and then erasing them from your brain until next year.

It’s hard enough to get worked up over who we’re still nominally rooting for. What did the Mets give us to support as the shock of the trade deadline overhaul wore off and the one-third of a season that threatens to redefine near-term misery kicked in? Carlos Carrasco pitched gamely for six innings, holding the Royals to three runs and maybe earning a feelgood seat for a quality start. Buck Showalter left him in to begin the seventh because any inning not given over to middle relief on this team is a small victory unto itself. Carrasco gave up two hits; was visited by Jeremy Hefner; and, imbued by the wisdom of the pitching coach, proceeded to have his very next delivery blasted over the right field wall by Drew Waters. That a ballpark embellished by a fountain display would have Waters make a splash seemed appropriate. That the Mets would be down by six en route to several more seemed inevitable.

It’s easy to pick on guys we’ve never heard of when they suddenly appear in our uniform. I did it after Wednesday’s game when presented the likes of Jonathan Araúz as my starting second baseman. Is it the fault of a professional baseball player who entered 2023 with nearly 200 big league plate appearances that I don’t know him from a hole in the head? I apparently saw him play on television in 2020; it’s on his permanent record that he competed against the Mets in two games inside an empty Fenway right after the pandemic mini-slate got underway. In the fourth inning Thursday, Araúz grabbed a sinking liner and turned into a heady double play. All right, now Jonathan isn’t just a strange name. He’s done something. He’s a Met.

Four innings later, Araúz undermined a 5-4 putout when he received a throw from Brett Baty in the neighborhood of second base. The baserunner he thought he’d forced was initially called out, but the Royals, using eyes, challenged and got it overturned (the umpire must have not been in the vicinity of the neighborhood). It wasn’t one of those plays they had to show from myriad angles to determine if the fielder’s foot was off the bag. The fielder’s foot might as well have been on the bus to Syracuse.

Yeah, he’s a Met.

At that point, the Royals were ahead, 8-0, which is to say it didn’t matter a whole hill of beans that Araúz made one of the more unforced errors a fielder can make — he took his foot off the bag to make the catch and never put it back on before relaying without results to first — but, man, when the season’s rapidly racing down the tubes, you don’t need to give it a shove and you don’t need to produce a play that serves to encapsulate how bad things are going.

Then again, you could forget about Araúz’s blunder pretty quickly, because once the Mets were down by eight, Buck was bringing in infielder-outfielder Danny Mendick to pitch. Danny Mendick was considered something of a get when we signed him in the offseason, a capable utilityman available after rehabbing from ACL surgery. The resource-laden Mets could stash an actual major leaguer at Triple-A, let him play his way back into shape and then come up to be a weapon off the bench for the postseason push sure to come.

Not sure to come: pitcher Danny Mendick. Also not sure to come: the Mets utterly unspooling while playing out the string with a full third of a season to go. For the record, Mendick allowed a runner he inherited from Josh Walker to score and gave up a couple of long fly balls, but otherwise wasn’t Royally strafed. Also for the record, Mendick didn’t perform any worse from the mound than Walker, who at least on Thursday didn’t balk any winning runs home before throwing a single pitch as he did on Tuesday.

Francisco Lindor prevented the Mets from being shut out by finally coming through with a runner on base in the ninth. His Estée Lauder home run couldn’t have been more cosmetic. The final might have wound up 9-2, but if ever a series-sweeping score deserved to go into the books at 9-0, it was this one. Spiritually, these Mets have forfeited.