Distant Dispatches

Well, at least this time Mets pitchers didn’t walk anybody.

Luis Severino wasn’t giving out free passes Tuesday night in San Francisco, and for four innings he wasn’t let any Giant earn his way onto the bases either. But the well ran dry in the fifth as lousy sequencing and buzzards’ luck combined to turn a scoreless tie into a 3-0 Giants lead. That was more than enough for the Giants, as Logan Webb had all his pitches working. That Bull Durham line about ungodly breaking stuff in the Show? It could have been written for Webb, who dismantled the Mets with sinkers, changeups and the occasional sweeper: fifteen outs via ground balls. Webb is infuriating to watch as an enemy fan and no doubt as an enemy hitter: You want to moan “Don’t swing at that!” as guy after guy looks disconsolate after swinging at that. Easy advice from the comfort of the couch; at the plate, to borrow from another movie classic, would that it were so simple.

The recently rollicking Mets have now lost three in a row and sunk back to a lone game above .500, and I’m trying not to glower at the game logs from April 2023 and scream at anyone who’ll listen that it’s happening all over again. We’ll know soon enough if it is or not, if shoddy defense and nibbling at the elusive corners of the plate will prove fatal, or if this dip is just part of the normal ebb and flow of the season, maddening in the moment but not particularly consequential in review.

At the moment, though, I’m dwelling on something else I already knew: that these middle of the night games on the other side of the country aren’t conducive to alert viewing, happy recapping or amiable anything else. Come home, boys, home to 7:10 and blue and orange with pinstripes (and the occasional charcoal oddity) and one hopes better outcomes.