Whoomp, Stare It Is

As one who doesn’t subscribe to Peacock, I couldn’t tell you what Sunday’s Mets-Angels game looked like, but from the sound of it over WCBS-AM, it was quite the staring contest. The Mets stared at the Angels. The Angels stared at the Mets. It was 0-0, 1-1 and 2-2. Two teams used to staring into the abyss had at last encountered their respective match. Who would withstand who? Who would blink first, or simply nod off?

The Mets, that’s who. The Angels blinked. Or got tired of staring a little sooner on a sleepy afternoon. The game started at 12:05 PM following a Saturday night affair. Barely enough time to listen to American Top 40 on SiriusXM’s ’70s channel and then shift dulcet tone gears from preserved for posterity Casey Kasem to alive and well Howie Rose & Keith Raad. First pitch probably ate into a few pregame naps.

We just spent three days in the company of an outfit I’ve long considered our Southern California spiritual brethren (early 1960s expansion roots; enormous market with a suburban bent; overbearing neighbors; never enough enduring success), yet this version of the Los Angeles Angels, for all the starpower their one standing star brings wherever he goes, felt like an assortment of Anaheim strangers. Shohei Ohtani needs no introduction. Four certified Old Friends™ — Brandon Drury, Aaron Loup, Eduardo Escobar, Dominic Leone — constitute a portion of his traveling party. Plus I seem to catch a few innings of the Angels late at night via the MLB Network every couple of weeks. All of that, and I swear they seemed more of a mystery by the last out Sunday than they did when they arrived on Friday.

This series drew well, presumably owing to the Ohtani factor. Watching and listening to the crowd reaction, especially from those draped in his Angel and WBC gear, I was brought back to the influx of McGwire and Sosa idolaters at Shea when the home run virus spread far and wide. I was surrounded by people wearing Cardinal or Cub jerseys who I were pretty sure couldn’t have named any other Cardinal or Cub. They surely weren’t interested in the Mets’ best interests, and my resentment boiled. Ohtani’s acolytes, the first two nights, didn’t bother me. His celebrity speaks for itself, and whatever the Angels did, it didn’t threaten to trip up a Met playoff chase. Shohei the showman was giving those folks what they came for. Cheers for his hits and steals meant something went wrong for the Mets, but things have gone wrong for the Mets without much pause in 2023. At least somebody at Citi Field was giving some people there something to cheer about.

In the finale, however, when Ohtani went hitless, particularly the two times he struck out, I could hear a torrent of boos pervading the Mets’ ballpark. I don’t care how transcendent a figure he is. I don’t care what good he does for baseball. I don’t care that we’re in last place. The striking out of an opposing batter by a Met pitcher is not to generate anything less than tacit approval at Citi Field. That’s my rule and I’m sticking to it. Once Ohtani made his fourth out Sunday, I was ready for the Ohtaniacs, like the McGwirephiles and Sosascenti, to take a hike. (I mean, sure, come back if the guy wants to sign here, but we’ll deal with that chicken when it crosses the road.)

Escobar got a nice hand, which was deserved. Eduardo’s Met tenure now seems ages removed, as if he was part of the crew that ran roughshod over the National League in 2006. Nope, it was only a year ago he was a part of better days, only this year he was going down with the ship before being offered a leaky lifeboat in the form of a trade to the Angels. He played only in the last game of the weekend set and doesn’t seem to be of much everyday utility to Los Angeles of Anaheim. Nevertheless, his presence had me yearning for days of barely yore. I kind of hoped he’d pull a Coffee Black from the ABA tribute movie Semi-Pro and, like the charismatic player the doomed Flint Tropics had recently traded, drop his red warmups, cross the diamond to the Met dugout, and tell Lindor, McNeil or anybody he recognized, “I’m with y’all.”

Whoever the hell the rest of the Angels are and whoever the hell the rest of the Mets are got it on in professional enough fashion. No Mets tossing the ball around the infield after the recording of an inning’s third out like happened Friday. No Angels zinging one off their own pitcher’s noggin after the catcher threw to the absolutely wrong base (there are only three of them) as transpired Saturday. Pete Alonso’s own melon avoided contact with flying objects, thank goodness. Pete looked good, driving in one of those runs that produced one of those aforementioned tie scores.

The other Pete looked great. The other Pete is David Peterson. Buck Showalter regularly refers to David as “Pete,” which is confusing for the home viewer (SNY gets to do a postgame show even when Peacock struts on a Sunday). Well, the David otherwise known as Pete could be described as a godsend if a higher power could possibly be concerned about who would lift slack for These Mets after a veritable bullpen game the night before. David took care of seven innings and gave up only one run in the process. If “Pete” is really what he’s called internally, then he earned his clubhouse nickname, because that was a powerful performance, even if it was equaled by Angel starter Griffin Canning. That’ll happen in a staring contest.

Drew Smith succeeded Peterson when the score was 1-1 in the eighth, and immediately threw “the home run ball,” as Howie called it, which made me think that’s a pitch Drew (or Smitty) should remove from his repertoire at once. Fortunately, the Alonso commonly known as Pete drove in the shortstop known as smoking hot with the run to make it 2-2. The shortstop is Francisco Lindor, now on a thirteen-game hitting streak, which is better than whatever the other Francisco has been on. Catcher Alvarez has been navigating the slumpiest of waters — his August falloff is historically reminiscent of what another Met rookie strongboy, a slugger named Ron Swoboda, went through in 1965 (15 homers before the All-Star break, only four thereafter) — but maybe, just maybe, he’s set to come out of it, having made enough contact to concoct an infield hit in the fourth, a grounder Angel second baseman Luis Rengifo (the same guy who’d hit Smith’s home run ball later) could only smother. The Mets appeared to load the bases as a result, but spunky Jeff McNeil — urged on by spunkier Alex Cora — raced from second to home as the LAA infielder struggled to his feet. That’s how we scored our first run, the one Peterson guarded as a lead clear to the seventh.

That was the essence of the staring contest for eight-and-a-half innings. Once Adam Ottavino retired the Angels in the top of the ninth, a person listening at home debated the likelihood of Rob Manfred’s fugazi extra innings, given a) that the Mets are the Mets when it comes to scoring; and b) the Angels, though I don’t know them well, seemed pretty damn Metslike in their ability to let a game get away. The PointsBet folks would have gladly taken my action either way, I’m sure.

Alvarez got himself grazed by a pitch, which will circumvent any slump (it was close enough for the Angels to challenge, but it stuck). No dugouts emptied and young Francisco was no worse for the ding. Tim Locastro came out to pinch-run, which made sense, not only because Locastro is faster than Alvarez, but because Daniel Vogelbach had already been hit for. “It’s not like I only wait around for Vogey to get on base, you know,” Locastro’s thought balloon says. “I can run for anybody!”

With Locastro on first, DJ Stewart singled to right, which was characteristic (dude can rake some) and a wee bit ill-placed, because the Angel right fielder, Hunter Renfroe, has an arm of which to be wary (a tidbit I picked up from my radio friends). Mark Vientos, back from the IL, never had a chance to knock in the winning run or, for that matter, ground into a double play. He took his four unintentional balls from reliever Reynaldo Lopez and liked it. So did we.

OK, bases loaded, nobody out. What the fudge is gonna go wrong? That was my thought when Rafael Ortega came up with a chance to win the game. That was also the thought of my counterpart across the country, the Angels fan who’s rooted for them as long as I’ve rooted for the Mets, except his “gonna go wrong” was directed at his own object of affection/derision. I rooted hard for the 2002 Angels to win the World Series because I imagined I had a veritable doppelgänger living somewhere in SoCal and I sure wanted that guy — around 40 years old at the time — to get one title after all he’d been through. If he’s still out there, having passed 60 and still searching for a sequel, he was on his own Sunday.

Me, I had Rafael Ortega. And now I will always have Rafael Ortega, even if the Mets won’t after this season ends. Ortega ensured his sliver of Met immortality by sinking a fly ball along the edge of No Man’s Land, or at least not inside Renfroe’s zone of defensive comfort in right field. Hunter nearly made a stumbling catch that would have likely resulted in Locastro tagging up and scoring, because however strong the right fielder’s arm, his angle wasn’t optimal to make an effective throw.

But why take any chances? Better that it fell in for a single, sending Locastro across the plate cleanly and turning the heretofore space-filling Ortega into a Met walkoff wonder. Immediately, I found myself in mind of Austin Jackson, the last outfielder I can remember the Mets picking up to help them get a season (2018) over with who managed to sneak a walkoff hit onto his permanent record. Jackson’s action stays with me thanks to the circumstances surrounding his auspicious occasion: it was David Wright’s final game, which SNY shows a lot. That one did go into extras, to thirteen, back when extra innings featured only the baserunners who earned their way on without commissioner’s assistance.

Ortega is also part of a slightly larger, harder to narrowly define cohort. Or might ultimately be. Jackson’s part of it. Nori Aoki, (2017) too. If we include pitchers, Aaron Harang (2013). Going back a bit further, you have your Cory Sullivan (2009), your Wilson Delgado (2004), your Kevin Bass (1992). These are the major league veterans who transcend mere Met-for-a-minute status (reflexive Random Met citings need not apply). They suddenly showed up on the Mets in some second half when the Mets were going absolutely nowhere and were now a part of our lives on a surprisingly regular basis, playing almost every day or, in Harang’s case, slotting into the rotation for more than a test spin. We’d never seen them coming Metwise, and we’d never see them again in orange and blue. They weren’t brought in to help us win anything. They were here to give us a hand so we could limp toward the finish lines of seasons that were over before they were over. They played a bunch, then they completely disappeared from our Met consciousness.

I thought that might be DJ Stewart’s legacy, but Stewart is a comparative rock of this organization now, so maybe it will be Ortega, owner of a certified Mets walkoff RBI single, who inherits the mantle of what we might call this season’s Dead End Achiever, when the greatest accomplishment of all is coming to the ballpark, putting on a Mets uniform that may or may not have been measured to fit, and soaking up innings/at-bats. Should a walkoff hit emanate during that time on the clock, all the better.

We won’t know if Ortega’s highlight(s) as a Met will lead him to a dead end. For all we know, we’ll see him in camp next February and he’ll be a valued part of the team for many a Sunday to come. Same for Stewart or Jonathan Araúz or anybody else who’s seeped into our field of vision long enough to morph from “who’s that guy?” to “oh, he’s batting sixth tonight”. Maybe all the 2023 Dead Enders are making a case as essential Mets in 2024 and beyond. Probably not. But until proven otherwise, they persevere as Mets and continue to earn “hey, ya never know” status.

The Mets themselves, meanwhile, don’t yet have a skull-and-cross bones next to their name in the standings to denote mathematical elimination from postseason consideration, but the very final ember of remotely conceivable longshot possibility is on the verge of extinguishment. After the 3-2 win over the Angels on Sunday, the Mets sit at 60-71. Win tonight versus Texas, and they are 61-71. That record is what the 1973 Mets were as of August 30, the last day they languished in last place. From there, everything we know and cherish about the efficacy of You Gotta Believe began to kick in in earnest, inadvertently casting a pale glow on any Met team stumbling in near total darkness for five months across the fifty years that followed.

The 1973 Mets didn’t just win one of history’s most unlikely pennants. They created an almost impossible precedent for which Mets fans have grasped when there is nothing left to grab hold of. Our sweaty hands, despite a plethora of playoff spots seemingly there for the taking this year, have kept coming up empty these past five months. The 61-71 Mets of a half-century ago stayed within wishing distance despite occupying the bottom of the National League East, creeping to within six-and-a-half games of first after being double-digits behind earlier that summer. The pack came back to them before they made their biggest move; objects in the front windshield proved even closer than they appeared. Should everything break right tonight, the 61-71 Mets of 2023 will be only eight games out of the final Wild Card berth in the National League with thirty games remaining, and you know what that means.

It means we’ll be one day closer to this dead end of a season being over.