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ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
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by Greg Prince on 2 May 2025 1:06 am I and presumably you root for a team that either wins every game or comes very close to winning every game. In 2025, which is now almost exactly one-fifth over in terms of regular-season baseball, the Mets have played 32 games; outscored their opponents in 21 of them; lost by exactly one run in five of them; and came up short by two runs in four of them, including their most recent contest. Mathdoers will confirm that leaves only two games they’ve been what you’d call out of it to date. One was a three-run loss, the other a five-run loss.
No fan ever calculates all the wins his/her/their team shouldn’t have wound up with, but we do allow ourselves the fantasy of obtaining every game that got away. When we do that, the Mets are a conceivable 29-2 thus far in 2025. Anything’s conceivable, I suppose, so why not the bestest-case scenario? We’re indulging in fantasy here. Every scenario is reviewable.
Going down, 4-2, to the Diamondbacks in Thursday’s frustrating series finale qualifies as another coulda/woulda, yet it was also the closest thing we’ve “suffered” to a blowout loss in more than two weeks. Dating back to our final game in Minnesota, we could have — I mean really could have — been on a fourteen-game winning streak to end April. That last Twins game, way back in the middle of the month, came oh-so-close to victory. So did the two losses in Washington. So did Wednesday night’s at home to Arizona. There, four losses by one run apiece to go with the ten wins by however many runs. The wins felt like destiny. The losses felt like mistakes. By Tuesday night, when the Snakes were properly tamed by timely hitting, awesome defense, and as much pitching as was necessary, all the postgame questions for the manager and his players were variations on “isn’t this great?”
Yes. It is great.
The games that don’t conclude with actual wins? Less great. Thursday’s edged close to triumph, but not close enough. Juan Soto hit two home runs, itself a victory, given that Juan hadn’t homered at Citi Field since becoming a Met. His blasts would have been more of a blast had anybody been on base for them or if he had been joined in slugging by any of his teammates. The Mets weren’t much for rallies all afternoon, and none among Kodai Senga, Genesis Cabrera, Max Kranick and Reed Garrett was at his absolute stingiest. Cabrera, a lefty, is here because neither A.J. Minter nor Danny Young is any longer available. Genesis joined Ty Adcock in supplementing a staff that is running a lot of reliever roulette of late. Brandon Waddell and Chris Devenski are already back at Syracuse. Jose Ureña is a free agent.
Wait, these sound like challenges or difficulties or, heaven forefend, problems. Even first-place ballclubs are entitled to sing the blues as applicable. We are the NL East-leading, ten-above-.500 New York Mets, yet we are dealing with injuries, bullpen overuse, starting pitching that doesn’t go particularly long, a spotty offense in clutch situations, and, worst when ranking sins, not winning them all. This season has reminded me that when you’re close to winning them all, your craw gets stuck with the residue of not actually doing that. Before coming up two runs shy on Thursday, we were on a conceivable fourteen-game winning streak. I’m trying to decide whether a rather lifeless loss was simply due or whether it would have been transformed into a 5-4 win just by sheer Met momentum had we been playing for fifteen straight Ws.
In a season whose results have bordered on fantasy, it could have happened. In a season tethered to reality, I think we’re gonna be all right, challenges and difficulties and problems notwithstanding. We’re just not gonna win ’em all or necessarily come achingly close every single day.
by Jason Fry on 1 May 2025 12:33 am As a coping mechanism, I sometimes imagine there’s a series of Anti-Mets Classics — games so variously painful, frustrating and provoking that you’d only watch them again if forced to. In a CIA black site, perhaps. Or maybe in actual Hell.
That’s actually not an unconvincing vision of the afterlife for those of us who won’t gain admission to somewhere better: You find yourself in a drab third-rate hotel, eat a half-heartedly made room-service burger and turn on the TV because there doesn’t seem to be anything better to do. Suddenly things are looking up, because you’ve found Mets Classics! Only as the game unfolds, something starts to nag at you. Something feels … off. And then you realize what it is.
Wait a minute. This is that fucking game against the Diamondbacks, the one from the last day of April in 2025!
Suddenly it all becomes clear. This is Hell, and Anti-Mets Classics are the only Mets games one can watch here. And it will be this way for eternity.
To be fair, Wednesday night’s game was frustrating even before the bottom of the ninth, when everything fizzled against Ryan Thompson (no not that one) and the Mets wound up a run in arrears. Corbin Burnes looked like he was on the ropes in the first but somehow wiggled free. Ryne Stanek faltered again and gave up the lead that had been lovingly tended by emergency bulk guy Brandon Waddell, though fairness compels your chronicler to venture that Stanek was mostly unlucky, done in by a broken-bat hit and a little parachute Jeff McNeil had no way of reaching. (Speaking of unlucky, five of the Mets’ 10 losses have been by one run, including their last four.)
The Mets kept squandering chances big and small: Juan Soto got just under two balls, eliciting Citi Field cries of delight that turned into consternation as trajectories were assessed and found wanting. Carlos Mendoza made the odd decision to send Brandon Nimmo up to pinch-hit for Luisangel Acuna despite Nimmo looking like a shell of himself both at bat and in the field. After starting off with a couple of good ABs in DC, Francisco Alvarez‘s swing looks gigantic again. And in an dizzying couple of days the Mets have gone from feeling lucky to have two capable lefties in A.J. Minter and Danny Young to the possibility that both of them have been lost for the season. (I did a double take when Chris Devenski appeared on the mound, having no idea that something had befallen Young. I believe my exact words were, “Uh-oh, why are you here?”)
The pleasures of the game? Well, let’s see. We got our first sight of 82 worn by a Met in a regular-season game, though I’d prefer that guys making a regular-season roster wear real numbers — act like they should keep you. (Waddell aced that test otherwise, though.)
I also found myself in the best crowd I’d seen in some time — sure, their attention wandered during the long slog of the middle innings, but they locked in for the final frames, cheering madly for each good turn of Met fortune and groaning theatrically when things kept coming to naught. Plenty of today’s crowds would barely have noticed what Waddell did, or grasped how difficult it was; Wednesday’s crowd gave him a standing O, and that was nice to see.
Beyond that? Well, the game was finite in length, I guess that’s something. Maybe there was something else nice that I missed … you know what? Ask me again during the afterlife, when I’ve had my 253rd viewing of this one on Anti-Mets Classics.
by Jason Fry on 29 April 2025 11:48 pm All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Good start to a famous Russian novel; excellent advice for baseball bloggers. It’s easier to write about miserable failing baseball teams than it is to write about happy successful ones. Angst and agita drive clicks and sports-radio hits and they also generate pixels, whether your subject is the distance between where you are now and success (agonizingly close? depressingly distant?), the paranoia that the current misery is intentionally inflicted, or when all else fails that old standby of bemoaning why a benevolent deity would allow what’s been happening to keep happening. (While I’m no theologian, I can help you with that last one: The baseball gods aren’t benevolent.)
Contrast all that with, well, We won and the fellas look good.
Still, Tuesday night’s win did generate its share of pixels, and for happy, not-so-alike reasons.
The Mets beat the Diamondbacks 8-3, one of those contests that wasn’t as close as the final score indicated. The W went to David Peterson, supported by a relentless offensive attack: Home runs from Francisco Lindor and Starling Marte were the warmup acts for a Pete Alonso blast that would have prompted a 70s color guy to cackle that a stewardess should have been aboard that one.
Peterson also benefited from an impressive show of defense: Alonso made two nifty plays, but up 7-0 in the top of the fourth, the Mets packed a month’s worth of highlight-reel plays into one frame. First came a magic-trick grounder that tipped off Mark Vientos‘ glove right to Lindor, who spun and fired it to Alonso to keep Randal Grichuk off base. Next came an extraordinary catch by Tyrone Taylor, who used a perfect read and first step to close ground on a Lourdes Gurriel Jr. drive into the left-field gap, diving on the warning track to snag the ball and just avoid contact with Jose Azocar. It was the kind of sequence you see in a superhero movie and mutter that the CGI looks impressive but needs a little more grounding in physics. Then came a bolt to Lindor’s backhand, which he coolly snagged and sent Pete’s way to erase Eugenio Suarez.
A pessimist might point out that Peterson was more lucky than good, as evidenced by the above; an optimist would note that Peterson was handed a big lead and pitched to contact, the kind of thing one wishes pitchers had the wisdom to do more often. Not even a pessimist could find fault with Jose Butto‘s relief outing — he looked very sharp after a string of worrisome appearances. Then came the latest mayfly Met — Kevin Herget was called up following Jose Urena‘s lone appearance, and will now be sent back down for Brandon Waddell, who will almost certainly then be sent down himself for yet another newcomer. Some of this reshuffling was needed because of the Mets’ current long stretch without an off-day; it was also necessary because A.J. Minter will be out for some time, possibly until next year. Minter’s replacement might ultimately turn out to be Brooks Raley, a move I was pleasantly surprised to see evolve from rumor to reality: Raley never struck me as the kind of player who takes to New York, so his return to the fold merits a little extra welcome.
In case you were worried, Urena and Herget had cards ready to be added to The Holy Books, as did Justin Hagenman; I’ve also got one set aside for Waddell and some other guys lurking in Triple-A. I went out and secured those cards during the deeps of winter when I wanted baseball to hurry up and get here faster. Then I pretty much forgot I’d done that and was pleasantly surprised to see that Past Me had been so thoughtful.
Baseball cards played a cameo in SNY’s broadcast once the outcome became academic, with a mint-condition, posterior-focused 1984 Topps Keith Hernandez spotted in the crowd emerging as a source of merriment for Gary Cohen and mock pique from the principal. Kudos to the kid who brought that card to Citi Field for sensing a good visual and parlaying it into a visit to the booth (with a piece of birthday cheesecake, no less!), though I’ll admit I was aghast that a 41-year-old card in beautiful condition was out there in the wild without so much as a plastic protective sleeve.
 To stick with this theme, an odd sidelight of modern card collecting is that each spring Topps produces “factory team sets” for all 30 big-league clubs — they’re the blister packs you’ll find in ballpark team stores. Factory team sets are refreshingly simple and old school, a relief given modern cards’ relentless focus on stars and relics and holographs and other bric-a-brac. Factory team sets don’t have any of that but are essentially some marketing team’s first draft of the roster: You get most of the guys from Topps Series 1, a few obvious stars who won’t be in general circulation until Topps Series 2, and more obscure guys you won’t see until the Update set, if you see them at all. As an incorrigible baseball-card dork, it’s the obscure guys who excite me the most, as some of their factory team-set cards turn out to be unique.
So Topps’ Mets team factory set has nice cards for Alonso, Kodai Senga, Sean Manaea and Luisangel Acuna that are almost certainly the same as the ones we’ll get in Series 2. But it also includes cards for Harrison Bader and Jose Iglesias that will only ever appear here, since those beloved ’24 Mets are now the property of the Twins and Padres. And the big draw is a Juan Soto Mets card, which shows him Photoshopped (very nicely, I’ll add) into a Mets road uni.
Here’s the thing, though: It’s last year’s road uni, the iconic design that’s been lamentably discarded in favor of the putrid new Canal Street knockoffs. Soto is pictured in a uniform he’s never worn and that this tradition-minded Mets fan fears he never will wear. Maybe decades from now some kid will bring a 2025 NYM-16 to the booth for Soto to chuckle at and autograph.
But hey, a plea to that as yet unborn kid: Put it in a sleeve, will ya?
by Greg Prince on 29 April 2025 2:20 am The Unicorn Score Monitor went on high alert in the middle of the eighth inning Monday afternoon after the Mets increased their lead over the Nationals to 15-0. That score rang a bell for not having rung a bell in my head, a repository that also serves as the unofficial institutional memory of New York Mets baseball. A quick Stathead search confirmed the Mets had indeed never won a game by a score of 15-0. Hence, a Unicorn Score, a final tally by which the Mets have won once and only once in a regular-season affair, was considered in sight.
While Brandon Nimmo deserved kudos for busting out with a nine-RBI day (that’s some busting out) and tying Carlos Delgado’s club record for most runs driven in a single game, I wasn’t nearly as excited by his burst of productivity as I was by the prospect of seeing the Mets win with a combination of runs scored and runs allowed that was unprecedented in franchise history. Prior to Monday, the Mets had posted only 22 Unicorn Scores in 64 seasons. These things with the horn in their forehead don’t come around very often.
All reliever Jose Ureña — who checked in as the 1,262nd Met overall — had to do in the eighth and ninth was not give up any runs, something he hadn’t done in the seventh, something Max Kranick hadn’t done in the sixth, something Griffin Canning didn’t do over the first five innings. Canning guarded a close game, leaving after the Mets had built a 3-0 lead. Kranick had the luxury of pitching with a 6-0 cushion. Once that advantage had elevated to 11-0 (Nimmo’s second homer, a grand slam, assuring all but the most doomsaying “they can still blow this” ledgedwellers they could come back inside), it became Ureña’s game for the duration. At 15-0, journeyman Jose was on a mission he didn’t know about.
Bag us a Unicorn.
About three seconds after I realized what was at stake, Ureña gave up a leadoff home run, and 15-0 slid off the table. We’d had only one 15-1 victorious final in our history, which meant if everything held as was, we’d be looking at Uniclone Score, or the clone of a Unicorn Score. Uniclones are intriguing as possibilities if the Unicorns they’re replicating are old enough. This one went back to June 6, 1992, a night Bobby Bonilla wished to fill the Pirates with regret for letting him walk. Maybe for that one evening he did. Bonilla drove in four at Three Rivers, while Todd Hundley and Chico Walker each knocked in three; they all homered. A 33-year-old Unicorn Score might deserve an encore by now. Only eight Unicorn Scores in the Met annals are older.
 “New York Groove” is fine, but some days demand a different celebratory song. But why clone when you can create? Why waste this golden creation opportunity? At 15-1, Ureña was instructed (by me, telepathically) to give up not one more run, but two or three. The Mets winning by a score of 15-2 wouldn’t do anybody any good, given that the Mets had previously put four 15-2 wins in their storied books. I mean, yeah, they’d have a win, but I was pretty sure they were gonna have that, anyway…even after those two six-run leads dissipated Sunday.
Ureña did and didn’t help me out. With one out, he gives up a solo homer to Luis Garcia to make it 15-2. No help. But then he continues to struggle, which is working to the Unicorn’s advantage. Listen, I wish Jose good luck in future outings, but he’s not gonna stick around after this game. He’s here because A.J. Minter is on the IL, and he’ll be back at Syracuse to make room for Brandon Waddell to start against Arizona. Just give the rest of the bullpen a blow in this quintessential mopup appearance and, if you can find it in your heart, give up one or two more runs, because the Mets have never won by scores of 15-3 or 15-4.
Grisly details aren’t necessary, except to say Ureña got the score to 15-4. Perfect. Now get a third out. And he does. But he doesn’t, because the third out, on a grounder, gets overturned, as a) umpires are terrible calling plays at first base; and b) video review is so ingrained in baseball’s culture now that no manager is willing to let an abysmal call stand, not even in the get-it-over-with portion of a blowout.
Nor should they…unless it’s messing with my Unicorn Score Monitoring.
Given an extra at-bat in the home eighth, the Nationals churn out another run to make it 15-5. That is not Unicorn territory, though I must confess I wasn’t wholly disappointed, for the only 15-5 score the Mets had ever won by came at the tail end of the 1964 season, the third-oldest Unicorn in captivity. Mets 15 Cardinals 5 on October 3, 1964, was a huge deal in its day because it was throwing a Redbird Wrench into the dizzy three-way race for the NL pennant. The Mets, who to that point in their existence had only watched others contend for a flag, were legitimately playing spoiler during the ’64 campaign’s final weekend. They had won the night before by a 1-0 score (we’ve won by a final of 1-0 142 times), and now they pounded St. Louis, and if somehow they kept it up, a three-way tie among the Cards, the Phils, and the Reds was possible, and Casey Stengel’s bumblers straightening up and flying right would have been the chaos culprits.
Except the Cardinals won on the final Sunday, and the Mets’ spoiling was reduced to a footnote. Yet it was on my mind when the eighth inning ended at Mets 15 Nationals 5. I guessed I could live with a Uniclone Score packing that kind of “first time in 61 years” precedent.
 The most discerning of Mets fans know to raise their hands to heaven when a Unicorn Score is in sight. Ah, but there was still one more inning to go. The Mets, as the road team, of course would bat, and it was the kind of day when the Mets batting augured offense, especially late. Remember, it was 3-0 through five, when the primary storylines were Francisco Alvarez (run-scoring double) and Jeff McNeil (sac fly and solo homer) honing themselves as everyday weapons. Nimmo didn’t get going earnest until his three-run shot in the sixth. Then came the seventh, with Brandon’s grand slam and fourth through seventh RBI. In the middle of the all-day onslaught, Francisco Lindor managed to get himself hit by pitches twice, as in twice in the seventh inning. Like Nimmo tying Delgado, Lindor tied Frank Thomas. Thomas got hit twice in the same inning on April 29, 1962. The Mets scored seven times in that frame en route to their first shutout triumph, whitewashing the Phillies, 8-0 (we’ve won by a final of 8-0 32 times).
Therefore, after two in the second, one in the fifth, three in the sixth, five in the seventh, and four in the eighth, it was fair to infer 15-5 might not be a done deal. And when it was announced that now pitching for the Washington Nationals would be lucky No. 13, Amed Rosario, you figured window panes in the vicinity of the Navy Yard were in danger.
Rosario was our second Old Friend™ of the day. Trevor Williams started for the Nats and gave up the Mets’ first five runs. Three relievers followed before Davey Martinez (who was challenging calls in the eighth) went into white flag mode and tabbed our former shortstop as his next pitcher. If you pressed your ear to the speaker, you could hear a Unicorn licking its lips.
Three batters and not too many more miles per hour into the ninth inning, it was Mets 16 Nationals 5, nobody out. I needed the Mets to keep going, as 16-5 had been accomplished three times in franchise history, and I don’t have a cute name for scores registered more than twice. Also, we had the matter of Nimmo awaiting another turn at bat. You figured he could break his temporary tie with Delgado simply by making eye contact with Amed. All Mark Vientos, who was hitting in front of Brandon, had to avoid was hitting into a triple play (which we learned during this series you can do without actually doing) or clearing the bases on his own.
Alas, you can’t blame Mark for muscling up on a Rosario delivery that measured 52 MPH and sending it over the center field fence. On a feast day for the entire Met lineup, everybody eats. Three RBIs on that swing for Vientos. Three for McNeil in all. Luisangel Acuña went 3-for-6 in the nine-hole with a ribbie. Jesse Winker and Pete Alonso drove in one apiece. The aforementioned Alvarez RBI double happened in the second, but it was technically part of this same game. Brandon couldn’t have all the fun himself. He took his cut at Amed’s speed-limit stuff and couldn’t add to his ledger. Dude had to settle for 4-for-6, four runs scored, and those nine ribeye steaks. Now that he’s gotten hot, let’s hope Brandon doesn’t abandon baseball to open a butcher shop.
Eyes on the prize here. Vientos’s three-run blast made the score Mets 19 Nationals 5. It stayed that way heading to the bottom of the ninth. That Unicorn I’d been nurturing was ready to enter the world fully grown. All Jose Ureña had to do now was not give up exactly three runs in the bottom of the ninth. We’d already won a 19-8 game, in 1990. We’d never won a 19-5 game, or a 19-6 game, or a 19-7 game, or anything from 19-9 to 19-18.
 Tracking data of which nobody else is more than vaguely cognizant, you mean? When was the last time you asked your closer du jour — having come on to start the seventh, Ureña was pursuing a save opportunity — to go ahead and give up one, two, or four-plus runs in the ninth, just not three? Maybe you had never done that, but that was all I wanted from Quadruple-A Jose. Let me see you nail down this save that itself would be unique. No other Met penman had ever earned an S in the box score while giving up as many as the five runs this righty had surrendered in the eighth.
In the ninth, Jose Ureña proved himself worthy of inclusion in any exploration of the Unicorn Score oeuvre. He gave up a walk with one out, but nothing more, and when he fanned Dylan Crews, the Unicorn came galloping onto the field at Nationals Park, visible to anybody seeking a sighting. Mets win, 19-5, the 23rd Unicorn Score in Mets history, the first in two years, the sixth in the past decade, which is as long as I’ve been tracking them. This doesn’t count the 14-9 Unicorn Score of August 22, 2015, because it was cloned the very next night and, therefore, is no longer in captivity.
No worries, however, as the twin 14-9s are living happily at the Uniclone Score Preserve upstate in the company of the ten other scores the Mets have won by only twice. They’re taken very good care of, treated regularly to ribeye steak dinners that are put on the tab of a surprisingly accommodating Bobby Bo every First of July.
MET UNICORN SCORES (Regular Season)
19-5, at Washington, April 28, 2025
17-6, at Oakland, April 14, 2023
18-1, at Buffalo vs Toronto, September 11, 2020
24-4, at Philadelphia, August 16, 2018 (1st Game)
17-0, at Citi Field vs Philadelphia, September 25, 2016
16-7, at Philadelphia, August 24, 2015
12-7, at New York (AL), May 13, 2014
16-9, at Detroit, June 29, 2011
14-6, at Citi Field vs Detroit, June 22, 2010
13-10, at Shea Stadium vs Washington, September 10, 2008
13-9, at Los Angeles (NL), July 19, 2007
13-7, at Chicago (NL), July 16, 2006
The Mets also beat the Dodgers, 13-7, in Game Three of the 2015 NLDS
17-3, at Shea Stadium vs Florida, July 8, 2006 (2nd Game)
18-4, at Arizona, August 24, 2005
15-8, at Shea Stadium vs Chicago (NL), April 23, 2000
15-1, at Pittsburgh, June 6, 1992
19-8, at Chicago (NL), June 12, 1990
23-10, at Chicago (NL), August 16, 1987
16-13, at Atlanta, July 4-5, 1985
20-6, at Atlanta, August 7, 1971
15-5, at St. Louis, October 3, 1964
19-1, at Chicago (NL), May 26, 1964
13-12, at the Polo Grounds vs Cincinnati, May 12, 1963 (2nd Game)
by Greg Prince on 28 April 2025 12:41 am The Mets scored seven runs against Washington on Sunday afternoon, featuring five in the first along with one apiece in the second and the fifth. Tylor Megill posted six strong innings of one-run ball. And I sensed that it was all going to be for naught. It was without pessimism or prescience. There was just something in the air as transmitted from Nationals Park via Channel 11 that suggested, despite the early edge the Mets enjoyed, neither enough runs would be added nor prevented by day’s end. At 6-0 in the second, I told Stephanie, “I’m now going to spend the rest of the game waiting for them to blow this lead.” I don’t usually say that or think that, especially in a season like this one has been to date.
To be fair, after a while I stopped waiting for the worst and attempted to dismiss my nagging hunch as the stuff of a wayward Cassandra. But I also noticed the Nationals’ starter, Mitchell Parker, hung in there for five innings, despite all the runs he allowed. Any time a pitcher primed for the hook bears down and perseveres seems like a harbinger of something. Also, too many fielders were having trouble with the sun and the sky. I mentioned that to Stephanie as well, more from an “isn’t it something the way they can track balls in these conditions?” perspective of admiration rather than as a foretelling of doom and gloom. It was one of the least comfortable six-runs leads I could remember. The Mets weren’t adequately adding on and the Nationals weren’t quite curling up, let alone dying.
But, like I said, I was willing to wave it away because the score was 7-1 after six, and Tylor, continuing to live up to my Bobby Jones 1997 comparison (underwhelming homegrown mid-rotation staple approaches stardom in his fifth season), was cruising. Then, however, the SS Megill encounters choppy waters…and Tylor leaves with one out, a runner on, and a run in in the seventh…and that runner who scored materialized on base because that aforementioned sun and sky came crashing down around Juan Soto in right field, resulting in a fall-in leadoff double that carried ill tidings…and here came Jose Butto, whose ability to fill a viewer with confidence was already limited…and the 7-2 lead the starter bequeathed the reliever ended the seventh as 7-6.
Just score more runs, and we’ll be fine. In the top of the ninth, after Huascar Brazoban wriggled out of a bases-loaded jam in the eighth, the Mets mounted about as substantial a threat as could be requested. Second and third, nobody out. The Nats are playing the infield in. It works for them once. It works for them twice. With two out, they can play at normal depth. That works, too. Three grounders, three outs. Still 7-6.
Ryne Stanek comes on for the bottom of the ninth. He’s the closer Sunday because Carlos Mendoza doesn’t wish to overuse Edwin Diaz. Truly, the entire bullpen is overused. Megill making it into the seventh was too much the aberration. Met starters, as splendid as they’ve been, don’t give depth. Maybe nobody’s starters give depth. But the Mets are the only team I watch daily, and I know I see our relievers too often.
As soon as Stanek gave up a leadoff double, I kind of knew the game was a lost cause. Still rooted to be wrong. Still knew or at least sensed I wasn’t gonna be. This is no way to conduct a bottom of the ninth after a top of the ninth like the one that came up empty. Sure enough, there’d be a productive out; an RBI single that knotted matters at seven; and, at last, the encapsulating play, the highlight/lowlight that could be enjoyed in Washington and abhorred in New York. With one out and runners on first and second, Luis Garcia — a pain all weekend — grounds a ball not very far, but to just an inconvenient enough spot wide of first. Pete Alonso grabs it and makes an abominable throw over Stanek’s head, which doesn’t absolve the pitcher, because the pitcher is slow to cover, so let’s just say everybody who can be at fault is at fault when it winds up Nationals 8 Mets 7.
 Everybody’s lost in D.C. Ultimately, it became one of those games you’ll reference in your head the next time something seems off when everything otherwise appears to be on. I spun through probably a half-dozen games like this one ended up being in the course of Sunday afternoon. Now I have a new example for future use. Yippee.
I didn’t know it was all gonna go down that way, but I sure as hell sensed it. Sensing it was coming didn’t make it go down any easier.
by Jason Fry on 27 April 2025 3:24 am A day later, there was no wackiness, no crazy reversals, and a fairly simple narrative. And you know what? That was just fine.
The rain threatened to play havoc with Clay Holmes‘ preparation and our afternoon plans, but Holmes persevered through two delays and I presume most of us did too — the only guy who looked worse for wear was the luckless member of the Nats groundskeeping squad who went down beneath the tarp drum or whatever they call the part of the tarp that isn’t the tarp.
Holmes was as good as he’s been in a Mets uniform, generating ground ball after ground ball; meanwhile the Mets’ lone bit of offense came on a Francisco Alvarez slice down the right-field line that everyone seemed to assume would go foul until it tucked itself inside the pole for a home run and a 2-0 Met lead.
The cliche is that it was “all the Mets would need,” and numerically I suppose that’s true. But it didn’t feel that way, not with the lead dangerously skinny and the ghosts of Friday night rattling their chains in our psyches. The Mets needed a lot more; the question was if they’d get it.
What they did get was superb relief work from Danny Young (who’s gone from back-of-the-pen suspect to reasonably trusted in a flash) and an effective though mildly nerve-wracking inning from Reed Garrett. But the plan went awry when A.J. Minter departed after a single batter, felled by tightness in his triceps. He’s basically been sent to the IL even before the MRI, which is not ideal; neither was pressing poor Max Kranick into emergency service once again.
Kranick came through, as he so often has — it feels like a million years ago that he was a postseason ghost and seemingly destined to be a trivia question. But the Mets stubbornly refused to add a precious run or two and handed the ball to Edwin Diaz, who these days comes with a whole undead army of chain-rattling phantoms.
Diaz fanned Luis Garcia Jr. but then walked Keibert Ruiz on four pitches, and the body language wasn’t great. Which was when Alvarez decided to go on offense in the service of defense. Remember how Rene Rivera used to excel at coaxing spooked-horse relievers through ninth innings to safety, with Jeurys Familia a frequent client? Alvarez’s approach is a little different — more drill sergeant than therapist, unafraid to give an earful to hurlers with far more years on Earth and seasons in the majors.
One of my enduring memories of the 2024 season is Alvarez in San Diego with his helmet off, barking at a saucer-eyed Huascar Brazoban, 12 years his senior. Alvarez didn’t care then and he didn’t care in DC. He let Diaz have it, doing everything except fire the ball back as a wake-up call, a la Jerry Grote. (And Gary Carter, though his angry return throws got less publicity.) And it worked wonders, at least in a very Diazesque way. Yes, our closer went to 3-2 on both Dylan Crews and certified pest Jose Tena, but both fastball and slider had more zing after the meeting of minds, and the administrator of said zing looked to be paying closer attention to the task at hand. Down went Crews on the fastball, down went Tena on the slider, and up went the W in the victory column.
by Jason Fry on 26 April 2025 12:35 pm On nights I’m recapping, I put a little warning for myself on repeat in my brain: It’s not all about the narrative. We see patterns while watching baseball (or while doing anything else, storytelling monkeys that we are) and we find them irresistible — pattern detection is a tool we use to make sense of a world that often seems to defy sense. To range perilously far afield from balls and bats (promise this will be brief), pattern detection is akin to our predilection for high-fat foods: They’re things that served us well as wandering hunter-gatherers in a world full of hostility and want, but have become maladaptive now that our chief adversaries include obesity and boredom.
But sometimes you can’t resist the narrative, and Friday night’s super-weirdo Mets-Nats tilt made that impossible, as it was filled to bursting with ironies and reversals and unclassifiable WTF-i-ness. The only problem, from our point of view, was that the narrative wound up being at our expense, with a last-second plot twist that I for one did not enjoy in the least.
(Though actually that’s not true. It was nicely done, and I admire both its craft and its cheek. Which isn’t the same as enjoying it.)
The Mets and Nats collided in a sporadically rainy DC, with Daniel Murphy joining Gary Cohen and Ron Darling Keith Hernandez and more than holding his own as a budding color guy, one whose next area of development should be learning to mesh with a partner or partners. (No knock on Murph whatsoever; this is the kind of thing that’s only learned in the doing.) The Mets were wearing their sad Canal Street knock-off specials, while the Nats did them one worse in sartorial decisions, taking in the field in bland City Connects 2.0 that are obviously and appreciably less interesting than their beloved cherry blossom City Connects 1.0.
(Look, I get that uniforms in general and City Connects in particular are vehicles for selling stuff, but what is with this new trend of teams using City Connects to discard their earlier good decisions? The Dodgers were first to reboot their City Connects, but that was wise as their first take made them look like overripe blueberries. But the Nats, Giants and Rockies have all unveiled new City Connects that are significant downgrades from what they had before, with the Marlins all but certain to make the same mistake next month. It stings all the more in the case of the Rockies, who’d joined the Marlins and Angels in crafting alt uniforms that ought to replace their regular ones.)
Kodai Senga looked solid though not quite himself in facing the Nats’ lineup, which is young and promising in ways that can bedevil opponents but also fans waiting for potential to gel into something more. Meanwhile, Jake Irvin kept the Mets off-balance, as he’s done repeatedly during his career, unwittingly honing his resume to be signed for the back of the Mets’ rotation in some year to come.
Our first narrative signpost came in the bottom of the second, when Dylan Crews singled to left with two outs and nobody on. Brandon Nimmo, not generally given to brain locks, mysteriously threw to third instead of second, allowing an alert Crews to take an extra base and leaving him perfectly placed to come home on a Jose Tena single that put the Mets down 1-0.
In the top of the fourth, Nimmo and Mark Vientos singled with nobody out to set things up for Jesse Winker, who hit a hard grounder that hit the dirt just in front of Nathaniel Lowe‘s glove at first. Vientos saw it was a one-hopper and sensibly kept going; Lowe saw it was a one-hopper and sensibly threw to second. But Alfonso Marquez ruled it had been a no-hopper, and a few moments later the Mets had hit into a triple play that never should have been. (An amusing sidelight: First-base coach Antoan Richardson all but blindfolding Winker to keep him from blowing a gasket.)
It’s not entirely fair to blame what happened on Marquez, who was behind the play. What is fair — and was Carlos Mendoza‘s main point of contention during both the futile on-field argument and his postgame remarks — is to blame the other three umpires for refusing to get together and overrule their colleague based on their (presumably) better angles.
For me that was the rub, or in this case the chafe. A lot was made about the fact that trapped balls in the outfield are reviewable while trapped balls on the infield aren’t, and while I agree that doesn’t make sense, it’s a point about which I throw up my hands, since so little about replay review makes sense.
The entire system is overly complicated, with reviewable/not reviewable just one system of the disease, and it will only get worse once balls and strikes can be challenged. For God’s sake, we don’t need challenges — if I wanted to watch the fucking NFL, I’d watch the fucking NFL. Just institute a no-arguments ABS system for the plate and have the umps in New York review on-field plays (of whatever variety) as needed. A yellow light in the ballpark means someone watching in Chelsea thinks an ump might need to take a second look; from there scoreboards parse replays and umps in the park don earpieces and mics as they do today. It would take two weeks tops for us all to get used to it and then we’d proceed without all this bric-a-brac.
What I took away from the whole farce came back to the narrative: Baseball portents are a tricky business, but when an umpire bad-calls you into a triple play, it might not be your night.
And yet it looked like it might be. In the eighth, with the Mets down 3-0, the storytellers really got to work carving patterns out of the play-by-play marble. With the bases loaded and two out, Nimmo hit a bounding ball over the head of pitcher Jose Ferrer that second baseman Luis Garcia Jr. just managed to keep on the infield, with Juan Soto saved from getting trapped between third and home when Keibert Ruiz bobbled the throw.
Enter Kyle Finnegan, the only trustworthy arm in the Nats pen. He threw a four-seamer that Vientos served down the right-field line, one of those Schrodinger’s balls in indeterminate flight that might collapse into a foul or an easy pop to the right fielder or trouble. It turned out to be trouble: Crews dove for it, missing by a few inches, and when various Mets were done huffing and scampering Vientos was on third and somehow it was 4-3 Mets.
The Mets got out of potential trouble in the bottom of the inning, when Tyrone Taylor cut off Garcia Jr.’s drive to the gap and made a nifty throw to second to just nab the runner, with extra credit to Francisco Lindor for alertly yelling at Jeff McNeil to let Taylor’s throw come through instead of cutting it off.
It was still 4-3 Mets come the ninth, with Ryne Stanek asked to fill in for Edwin Diaz, he of various ailments including hip cramps, legs not the same length and — one can no longer sugarcoat it — general unreliability. Stanek’s strong points have included general reliability, but he was in immediate trouble as Crews slashed a ball to right that Soto couldn’t quite keep in his glove at the fence, one of those plays that’s less “should have had it” than “you’d like to see it made.” Tena singled in Crews to tie the game; with one out Stanek was removed to fume hairily in the dugout while A.J. Minter tried to shepherd the Mets safely into the 10th.
Which almost worked. Vientos made a nice play to record a fielder’s choice, leaving CJ Abrams as the winning run at first and the huge James Wood at the plate against Minter. Minter got two quick strikes but his next three cutters weren’t quite tempting enough to coax Wood into delivering a harmless grounder.
Minter’s next cutter did produce the desired grounder; unfortunately it wasn’t harmless. It looked a lot like the play Garcia Jr. had made, but multiple little things conspired to make it different in a way that proved fatal. If McNeil had been able to field it (another play in the middle of the should have had it/you’d like to see it made axis) the Mets would have come to bat in the 10th. If McNeil had made no contact with it, it would have come to Taylor with a little more momentum and so given him a little more time. Instead it made incidental contact with McNeil, not changing direction but slowing down as Taylor (who’d rightly been playing no doubles) raced in hoping to avert disaster.
I was expected first and third, but Abrams kept going and as he rounded third Nationals Park was becoming New Soilmaster Stadium right before my eyes, with the Nats playing the role of OMG THE FUCKING MARLINS AGAIN. Taylor’s throw was yet another on the SHHI/YLTSIM spectrum — on target and made under duress but also hurried, off the mound and a little short — and there came Abrams’ hand across the plate just before the swipe from Francisco Alvarez‘s glove.
The Mets had lost a game in which the other guys got gifted a triple play, taken the lead on an unexpected uprising, and then watched everything fall apart, with Nimmo, Crews, Vientos, McNeil and Taylor all left to consider the vicissitudes of fortune and their own shifting roles in the story.
A pretty good game, if you like narratives, or can’t resist them. And now let us never speak of it again.
by Greg Prince on 24 April 2025 1:30 pm “No way we were losing that game!” I exclaimed the instant after we won that game, “that game” being Wednesday afternoon’s ten-inning thriller at Citi Field and “we” being the New York Mets, with me implicit in the first-person plural. Of course there were many ways we could have lost that game, as most games offer inflection points where things can go right or go wrong, depending on your perspective of right and wrong. From our perspective, it would have been wrong for the Mets to lose that game, therefore everything turned out right.
That’s been going on a lot lately, and who outside of Philadelphia is to complain?
There were two calls within the 4-3 Mets win that in just about every other season of Mets baseball I’m convinced would have been adjudicated differently. Neither of them directly impacted the outcome, but each had that “when you’re going horse[bleep], horse[bleep] things happen to you” feel to it. That bit of baseball wisdom would seem to apply to the Phillies these days.
One was Rob Thomson not being granted a replay review when Juan Soto threw out Nick Castellanos at the plate on Hayden Senger’s effective block and tag in the eighth inning. Video indicated there was no way Castellanos got his hand in, so unless there was a secret angle we weren’t seeing, no harm, no foul with no second look. Still, a manager being told, nope, you can’t have a review because you were a few seconds too late making your request felt like the kind of thing a Terry Collins or a Luis Rojas or any manager skippering on our behalf would have heard. Instead, it was told to the manager from the other dugout.
Thomson also didn’t get satisfaction after Castellanos was unbalked from second to first in the tenth. This was really an inning when the wrong way was in sight. Edwin Diaz, after a strong ninth, is pitching with the Ghost of Bryce Harper on second. Edwin strikes out Kyle Schwarber, but Ghost of Bryce steals third, because Edwin learned to hold runners on from Adam Ottavino. The infield comes in, which doesn’t make a difference when Castellanos shoots a single past a diving Mark Vientos. The Phillies take a 3-2 lead, which, honestly, felt a long time coming.
Brett Baty had hit a two-run homer in the second, but Zack Wheeler put the hammer down thereafter. Meanwhile, David Peterson had one inning in his five-and-third that involved a little more breaking than bending, when two Phillie runs crossed in the fourth. It was two-two forever, and the longer Wheeler goes giving up nothing, the more impregnable he seems to become. Fortunately, he went only six. The Phillies came oh-so-close to going ahead in the eighth, but there was Castellanos’s hand scraping dirt. The Mets came kinda close to winning in the ninth, with all the pieces in place for a cuckoo celebration when, with two out, Luisangel Acuña singled (I’d been thinking, “not the worst thing in the world here if he’s the final out because then he’s the ghost runner in the tenth”; shame on me) and late-inning magician Luis Torrens singled off the bench. Up came Francisco Lindor, and of course Lindor’s gonna get it done. Except, somehow, Lindor doesn’t get it done, and we have extras, and we have Diaz getting stolen on, and Vientos not nabbing the Castellanos single, and the Phillies breaking that tie.
Which brings us back around to Rob Thomson’s lack of satisfaction, for Diaz is on the mound disengaging from the rubber one too many times and has a balk called on him, which is technically what an umpire has to do. Except Diaz isn’t remotely trying to deceive the runner. The runner is Castellanos. He’ll figure out how to deceive himself. Edwin’s problem, we would learn, is a hip cramp. These guys do all kinds of stretching and take in (if we are to judge by the supplies on the bench) all kinds of fluids, but I guess it happens. Carlos Mendoza, Jeremy Hefner, and a trainer with a towel — always with a towel, I notice — come out and Diaz exits due to injury. We don’t know that it’s apparently not a big deal at the moment; in my mind, I’m thinking, “We had that great start in 1972 that was short-circuited by injuries, and here we are again.” I’m not even worried that we’re facing a runner on second with one out and, with Huascar Brazoban, Danny Young, and Jose Butto having already been used (and done well), Max Kranick coming in cold. Of course the game is about to be lost. I just hope the season isn’t going with it.
If conclusion-jumping were an Olympic event, I’d own at least a bronze medal.
The umpires decided in their wisdom that since Diaz wasn’t doing any serious balking versus Castellanos, he didn’t really balk. The man was in physical distress and trying to get loose or let the dugout know he required attention. So never mind the balk. Castellanos, you’re back on first. Thomson was upset again. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a balk overturned, and maybe the Phillies manager hadn’t. I have seen balks called for less egregious movements. No matter, for when Kranick finally declares himself warm, he walks the next batter and Castellanos lands on second with nobody out, anyway. Plus the batter, JT Realmuto, is now a baserunner, too, so don’t pout, Phillies. Sure, maybe Kranick would have grooved one to Realmuto if he was burdened by knowing a runner was on second rather than first when he came in. It’s unknowable, except for sensing that this is the sort of thing we can picture having happened to Mickey Callaway or Jerry Manuel or, despite his Talmudic knowledge of the rulebook, Buck Showalter. The Mets and their managers inevitably get screwed. That’s gospel.
Got some newer testament for us. Kranick, coming in under dire circumstances two days after throwing 36 pitches — and after allowing a single too short to score Castellanos from second — escapes. With the bases loaded, Bryson Stott flies to shallow center. Not gonna send Castellanos here, either. Max Kepler flies to right. Not gonna score anybody. The Phillies lead, 3-2, yet linger on the precipice of doom.
The Ghost of Francisco Lindor gives us more than a ghost of chance standing on second to start the bottom of the tenth. Soto, renowned thus far for everything but his power (it’ll come, I swear it will), produces the most productive weak grounder to the right side we could have asked for, placing Ghost of Francisco on third. All we need from Pete Alonso is a deep fly ball to ensure this game keeps going. We got more than we needed on a double into the right-center gap. It’s 3-3 now. Spiritually, this is a 16-inning game minimum, but we have spirits as runners so as to avoid true marathons. We might as well win this in ten.
Thomson orders Jordan Romano to walk Brandon Nimmo, meaning we have runners on first and second for Vientos. It would have been a good spot for Vientos to pull an NLCS Game Two and take personally the notion that an opposing manager would rather face him than a veteran. Maybe he did take it personally, but he couldn’t manifest that into anything useful. Mark struck out. But Starling Marte, who still very much exists despite his reduced role, comes up and singles to a patch of center field that facilitates Alonso’s trip home from second. Pete runs like a stocking in that you hope nobody stares and notices that it’s not quite something you’d intentionally show off in public, but he covers the area he needs to. The Polar Bear belly flops across the plate, and the Mets win, 4-3.
Let the cuckoo celebration commence! The first-place Mets at 18-7 are up by five game over last year’s division champs, who weren’t getting the calls or any wins during their three-day stay in Flushing. Pity for them. Hooray for us. Seven consecutive victories, best record in baseball, our cramping closer in one piece per his and his manager’s postgame briefings, and two key players we’ve done everything to this point without — Francisco Alvarez and Jeff McNeil — due back this weekend in Washington when the Mets don their updated road jerseys with the cheerful orange and blue accents and endeavor to keep the good times rolling.
“It’s only April” is usually what you say to tamp down enthusiasm. I’d add an “and” at the front of that sentiment to best reflect the Metsian mood of the month. We’re playing beautifully with not every single cylinder yet firing to its fullest extent, we’re pitching better than our lack of name-brand ace would have foretold, we’re clutch on both sides of the ball, we’ve been winning literally every day for the past week…and it’s only April.
Five or so more months of this? Maybe six? We’ll take it if we can have it.
by Jason Fry on 23 April 2025 1:08 am Some years ago, I improved my baseball life considerably by swearing off April games.
Yes, I know April baseball can be lovely — Greg and I once spent a snoozy but idyllic March 31 at Shea in 80 degree weather, watching the Mets and Phillies do nothing in particular until Alberto Castillo, of all people, won the game in the 14th. But mostly April games have followed a predictable path: accepting someone’s kind suggestion to go (seemed like such a good idea after so long without baseball), shivering and regretting the whole thing, hunting in desperation for bad stadium hot chocolate, and vowing not fall for this again.
But there’s sound policy and there’s being too rigid. Tuesday was a lovely day with temperatures borrowed from June, with the hourly forecast promising it would still be in the high 60s as midnight approached. After a brief, mildly paranoid check of weather variables Emily and I were in: This would be our season debut.
The year’s first trip to the ballpark is always special, even if fate directs you to the Bad Hot Chocolate line. There’s seeing all the new wrinkles to the ballpark experience and there’s also relearning beloved or at least familiar routines: which spot on the platform puts you in the ideal 7 line car, when to make a break for the bathroom with an eye on minimizing the wait, a reminder that a gray beard isn’t a substitute for an ID if you want a beer at Citi Field.
One thing I’m still working on committing to memory is that the center-field seats often aren’t the best choice. Shea had so few outfield seats that years later I’m still drawn to them; somehow getting to sit there strikes me as getting away with something, when in fact those seats are mostly far from the action and force you to deal with odd angles, foreshortened views and other issues. I picked up two seats on StubHub in the section bordering the bullpens on the right-field side, next to the Cadillac Club and just above it. I was pleased to see we were in the second row, but less pleased when I saw the view from my seat: It was fine if you leaned forward and rested an elbow on that wall, but sit back, as a person tends to want to do while seated, and half the field disappeared.
It had also been six months since I’d watched baseball as part of a crowd. In the early innings the tone of our section was set by a performatively trolling chatterbox of a Phillies fan; he was a lot to deal with in close proximity but sweet-natured beneath his bluster, and he actually paid attention to the game; I much preferred him to the amiable but dunderheaded Mets fans surrounding us, for whom the game was a vague event happening over there somewhere.
One thing I hadn’t forgotten was that watching baseball live is utterly different than watching it on TV. Griffin Canning was a little figure a couple of hundred feet away, far enough that I could only characterize his pitches as fast/not fast and near the plate/not at all near the plate. Cristopher Sanchez was a different such little figure, one wearing the uniform of the guys I wanted to lose.
Occasionally batted balls came near our section, to be dealt with by Nick Castellanos or Juan Soto. The bullpen catchers were regular visitors too, tossing balls back and forth with the outfielders and cheerfully granting or ignoring fans’ entreaties for balls. By the way, Soto’s love of sunflower seeds is quite something: There was almost no break in the action too short for him to get snacks from the bullpen. He also arrives at his position at pretty much the last possible moment, which I’m sure will upset people whose grift is maximizing upset but doesn’t bother me: I don’t know what the secret sauce of good outfield defense is, but I doubt it’s playing catch with the bullpen catcher.
The game ground along at a slow pace, with Canning getting in and mostly out of trouble and Sanchez’s pitch count climbing at an unsustainable pace. (He was gone after three innings and reports are he has forearm tightness — uh-oh.) The Mets kept threatening but stubbornly refused to break through until the seventh against Orion Kerkering. With two out, Pete Alonso doubled in Francisco Lindor to make a one-run lead into a two-run lead; a walk, a wild pitch and an intentional walk set up Kerkering against Luis Torrens, who smacked an 0-2 sweeper over the infield for two more runs, celebrated with an emphatic bat spike and fist pump that even registered out in the hinterlands.
That seemed to take the starch out of the Phillies; Kyle Schwarber somehow got doubled off first on a fly ball to Tyrone Taylor, prompting the outfield sections to serenade Taylor until he acknowledged us, probably to get us to knock it off. Ryne Stanek looked a little adrift control-wise, but Jose Butto had an encouraging 1-2-3 ninth and the Mets had won.
They’d won, we made our season debut, and I got to eat Mister Softee out of a helmet. That’s a pretty good night, wouldn’t you say?
by Greg Prince on 22 April 2025 1:53 pm Monday was Jesse Orosco’s birthday, so for a moment I thought the Mets were honoring him by nearly but not quite blowing a formidable ninth-inning lead. In the mind’s eye, Jesse flirted with disaster a lot in his not quite best years. In his best years, he was infallible in the mind’s eye. The mind’s eye doesn’t look things up to confirm hunches.
The rest of me does, however, so no, Jesse Orosco never had a game almost exactly like the one that one of his most celebrated successors as Mets closer did Monday. Nor did any of the famously nerve-wracking closers who have injected the ninth innings with agita and antacids in the years between Jesse’s glove and Timmy’s trumpet filling the Flushing air in their own manner.
 How we should celebrate every save. Let’s be clear on our terms. What happened in the ninth Monday night at Citi Field, after the Mets had built a luxurious lead of 5-0 versus Aaron Nola & Co. on…
• two Francisco Lindor home runs (including another leadoff keynote in the first and a later three-run bomb that happily evoked last October’s happiest madness);
• a Jesse Winker dinger;
• Tylor Megill’s further ascent toward rotation eminence via five-and-a-third frames worth of zeroes;
• and more sterling Yeomen of the Bullpen work when Carlos Mendoza judged Megill done after 92 pitches
…was the second of the evening’s Yeomen, Max Kranick, ran out of whatever fueled his scoreless seventh and eighth. Maybe Max wasn’t prepared to go from munching middle innings in relative anonymity to capturing his first major league save. He gave up three hits and a run without retiring a Phillie in the top of the ninth. Too bad Kranick couldn’t put the thing in the books and notch something sexier than a hold in the process, but that’s why we had a sizable edge and that’s why we have a closer.
Enter “Narco” man. Enter Edwin Diaz. Edwin Diaz locks games down, no muss, no fuss, right? Oh, wait, I’m working from an older script. There’s some muss. There’s some fuss. There are some Tums if you got ’em. But mostly you can count on Sugar to make the ninth-inning medicine go down. And, sure enough, Edwin secures the first much-needed out by flying Cal Stevenson to left. We could all breathe easy now.
Until the next batter, Bryson Stott, shot a three-run homer way the hell out of the park to make the game Mets 5 Phillies 4. Oh, those inherited runners. The Phillies were dead and buried for eight innings, and now they were alive and annoying, riding a real chance to upend not just this game but maybe the momentum of the divisional race. Yeah, it’s only April, But it was April in 1986 when we upended the Cardinals for the duration of that year. It was also April in 2018 when that humongous and admittedly inexplicable start we got off to (12-2) came crashing down in one inglorious eighth inning. Jacob deGrom handed his 6-1 lead versus the defending division champion Nationals with one out over to Jerry Blevins, who handed a three-run lead to AJ Ramos, who handed a two-run lead to Jeurys Familia, who completed the score’s conversion to a one-run Mets deficit. That was all in the same eighth inning. Hansel Robles came on in the ninth to make it worse. Final: Nationals 8 Mets 6. The 2018 Mets’ implosion was officially in progress.
A ninth inning that’s getting away gives the mind’s eye a lot of leeway to wander. It wandered from Diaz to thinking of that particular game from seven years ago to wondering if maybe Orosco’s glove was coming down on Edwin’s head at a most inopportune interval. This was too great a game amid too great a start to totally get away, but the scoreboard wasn’t lying that it was now a one-run affair, with that bleeping Phillie heart of the order coming up.
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to forlornness. Edwin Diaz turned back into Edwin Diaz. The good Edwin Diaz, I mean. Trea Turner goes down swinging. Bryce Harper goes down swinging. That’s all the swinging the Phillies get to do. The Mets hang on, 5-4. Megill gets his third win. Reed Garrett is credited with his seventh hold. Max Kranick gets one of those obscurities, too. And, from the annals of statistics that say what statistics say, Edwin Diaz nailed down his sixth save. The parameters were there. He came in with the tying run on deck and the other team never tied him. Way to technically go, Diaz!
No, of course it wasn’t the ideal way to go, but when somebody picks you up when they say they’ll pick you up, are you choosy about how they got there? Still, I thought, what an arduous method to earn a save. Orosco in his Messy Jesse moments must have had one of those. Or the Hall of Famer Billy Wagner. Surely Franco or Benitez, 1A and 1B in those nightmares we still have in which somebody is insisting to us, “Think of all the saves they don’t blow.” I’m often one of those doing the insisting, because high-profile Mets closers through the ages haven’t blown most of their save opportunities; it only feels like they do. And Diaz didn’t blow this one. If you tuned in an instant after Stott and just ahead of Turner, you saw only the toast of Timmy Trumpet’s tooting.
I had to confirm that something very much like this had happened at least once before to a Met in eerily similar circumstances. And it had. Once.
 Thanks to the marvel Baseball-Reference calls its Stathead tool, I was able to enter the relevant criteria:
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
As of Monday night, Stathead listed one Met pitcher as having previously filed such a performance. It wasn’t any Met closer you’d instinctively think of because the pitcher never held the title of Met closer. But on September 22, 2012, Jon Rauch, usually a setup guy (and a generally reliable one), was entrusted to finish what had been an R.A. Dickey masterpiece. By the latter half of September 2012, R.A. Dickey masterpieces were essentially all we had to root for. R.A. delivered that Saturday as he delivered virtually every day he wrapped his knuckles around the ol’ Rawlings. For eight innings, he had the Marlins shut out, cruising home with a 4-0 lead, his nineteenth win of the season clearly in sight. As the man for whom pitch counts were of little concern, Dickey was permitted by Terry Collins to continue his mastery of Miami into the ninth. The Citi Field crowd loved it. I can attest to that, as I was part of that crowd.
Ah, but the ninth this day wasn’t R.A.’s terrain. He walked Greg Dobbs on four pitches to start the inning. Donovan Solano followed by doubling. With dang Fish occupying second and third, Terry removed our simultaneously soft-spoken and loquacious ace and replaced him with the towering Rauch. All I really remember about Rauch was his height (six-eleven) and a story that came out the next year that he attempted to haze then-rookie Matt Harvey, tossing water on the new star while he dozed on a trainer’s table and destroying the kid’s phone in the process. Harvey reportedly won instant clubhouse cred by standing up to the veteran and telling the taller man to knock it the bleep off, or words to that effect. Rauch’s pitching I don’t remember that much, except that he nearly blew Dickey’s twentieth win. But that was five days later. The nineteenth win for our folk hero was still on the table.
Second and third, and Rauch makes it not easy. The first batter he faces is Miami catcher John Buck. Buck will become part of Harvey’s dizzying story in 2013 after a) he’s traded to the Blue Jays and b) traded by the Blue Jays to the Mets for, among others, R.A. Dickey. Buck will later be remembered mainly for nurturing Harvey Day Hysteria to its apogee; driving in runs like a madman in April but only April; and slamming a celebratory pie into Jordany Valdespin’s face in one of those episodes when postgame questions didn’t include any variation of this year’s nightly query of “how great is this right now?” The 2025 Mets get asked that continually and respond that it’s very great. The 2013 Mets were just trying to protect their faces and new phones.
But that was 2013. This was 2012. Buck was still a Marlin and, against Rauch, he was a September slugger. Despite my Saturday companion Joe calling out toward the mound, “YOU BETTER NOT GIVE UP A HOMER HERE RAUCH!” Rauch gave up a homer there. Two inherited runners scored, as did the batter. The four-run lead that Rauch came in to safeguard was now one, and the batter on deck who had qualified it as a save situation was up. That was Gil Velazquez. He struck out.
All right, slate clean, maybe we get through this with minimal angst from here. (Which is what I told myself after Stott took Diaz deep.) But, no, not really. There’s a pinch-hit single before a fielder’s choice groundout. Then there’s a stolen base. At last, there’s a strikeout, Rauch’s second. In all, he faced five Marlins before making sure the Mets would win, 4-3, and Dickey would move to 19-6.
Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save
 It was an ugly save, just as that scene with Harvey getting drenched must have been, but it was a save nonetheless, the final of four Rauch recorded as a Met. Thus ends the Jon Rauch-Edwin Diaz comparison. Diaz, we’re pretty certain, would never haze a rookie, phenom or otherwise. The Met vibe is beautiful these days. And a fifth consecutive win remains a win despite one pitcher reducing a ninth-inning four-run lead to one, just as a save remains a save, no matter how not beautiful it felt to endure until that definitive second K slammed the game shut. The 16-7 first-place Mets came out ahead by one — which is the minimum run differential required for a team to win — and Diaz indeed has an “S” affixed to his name in the box score. Also, as of this morning, he has joined Rauch in the results portion of my highly specific Stathead search.
In the mind’s eye, all saves oughta be worthy of Orosco-style Series-clinching exultation, no matter how much Pepcid we keep handy.
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