Four consecutive losses could have made a person think the stop after 111th Street on the 7 local to Flushing had been redubbed Mets-What’s The Point? The young season was clearly too callow to know it was already over (otherwise, it would have had the good sense to suspend its campaign). The plunging Mets might as well have dared those of us coming out to meet them and greet them to enjoy them.
Yet we did. Stephanie and I made a rare midweek day trip to Citi Field on Wednesday. Not so rare for me, but rare to the point of exotic for her, especially in April. My wife loves her Mets, but generally from a distance when there’s a literal chill in the air, not just the figurative kind coming from the home team bat rack. The relentlessly gracious Chapmans — Sharon and Kevin — had invited us and some other friends of theirs to join them for a treat bordering on indulgence: an afternoon not just at the ballpark, but in an Empire Suite. Wonderful people, team loyalty and a guaranteed modicum of climate control combined to make my usual solo act a couples activity.
A game in a suite is like a game anywhere else if you’re dedicated to the game. And we were. But I’d be kidding you if I didn’t admit an amenity or two beyond the functioning heat lamps infused the gathering with a little extra zest. At a less desperate Metsian hour, I could regale you with tales of the tray of Shackburgers in our midst and speculate as to why a perfectly sated man matching my general description lunges for an available eighth-inning sauerkraut-laden hot dog just because, like Everest, it’s there. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, as is wrath, and I’m sure that on Wednesday I could’ve been brought up on charges of both. (Throw in sloth, too, if you like; I’m no prize.)
Alas, self-examination will have to be tabled, somewhere next to the suite’s popcorn-filled batting helmets, for the business at hand in this final game of the first homestand of 2016 was not about what was partaken of too heartily, but what was provided in servings too small.
The Mets, you’ve likely noticed, haven’t scored very much this year. There were seven runs during the Home Opener, and otherwise they’ve generated as close to nothing as they can without provoking a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Porgy and Bess Society. Their scoreboard lines have featured plenty of nothing, particularly very recently: 0 runs on Saturday; 2 runs on Sunday; 3 runs on Monday; 1 run on Tuesday; 2 runs on Wednesday.
When you have starting pitching like the Mets possess, you can get by to a certain extent on a scoring-optional plan, but it requires needles being threaded and puzzles being solved.
The 0 doesn’t work whatsoever.
You have to be exceedingly fortunate to make the 1 stand tall.
2 or 3 makes your pitching staff’s day exceedingly difficult, but not altogether impossible.
This mathematical approach sure as shootin’ didn’t grease the skids of glory for spot starter Logan Verrett when the Mets went with zero for the six innings while he was in (hadn’t any of his teammates thought it a good idea to produce Logan’s run?). Yet Verrett — in the best tradition of backup quarterbacks who looked great in preseason and candidates who compile “surprisingly strong” showings without actually winning in early primary/caucus states — really gave us more than we could have expected. Our sixth starter went six innings versus Miami, allowing no dents whatsoever. The young man has the makings of a cult hero. Surely somebody called WOR or WFAN and suggested Verrett’s a better bet than Matz or Harvey or, for that matter, Kasich, based on late returns.
In so-called Panic City, where the streets are not zoned for small sample sizes, Verrett deserves a spot on somebody’s ticket. Perhaps he could be appointed Commissioner of Exactly What We Needed by Mayor Collins, who would eventually endorse every reason to lift the longstanding curfew on bullpen overuse and declare martial law.
Terry’s draconian measures didn’t take full effect until after Logan gave his 85 pitches of all to the civic cause. Jim Henderson came on for the seventh. Jim Henderson is shouldering quite the workload for a fella who throws hard with a surgically repaired shoulder. Maybe he’s throwing not quite so hard as he had been, given how much he’s being asked to throw. The New Toy Syndrome is a familiar one to anybody who’s watched Collins cling to whoever’s arm is freshest and hottest until it’s neither.
It wasn’t Henderson’s day, even though it seems every day is a day that includes Henderson, especially on Tuesday night when he threw 34 not particularly effective pitches. He faced three batters Wednesday. Three batters reached. Enter Hansel Robles, who bailed Jim out two-thirds of the way, then Jerry Blevins, who finished the provisional job. Hallelujah, the bases that were loaded with Marlins never led to a home plate stained by their slimy gills.
Then again, the plate was a pristine dish of 0-0 proportions clear to the bottom of the seventh, which was when the Mets’ bats creaked slowly awake. Wilmer Flores, first baseman for the first time in his MLB career, led off with a single and took second on a wild pitch. Asdrubal Cabrera and his one run batted in to date came up. I mentioned wrath before. I feel no wrath for Cabrera, who strikes me as a more pleasant Rey Sanchez-type, one with something left in the tank and no impulse to visit the clubhouse for an in-game trim.
Yet I can work up a quiet froth when I see a prospective rally broached by a prospective rallykiller, which is what, in the moment, I decided Cabrera was. I said, sotto voce, to Stephanie, “This guy is never going to get a big hit for us this year.” And with that, Cabrera got a big hit for us, singling hard to right, chasing Flores to third. After Juan Lagares moved Cabrera to second — which is a nice way of saying he tapped back to the mound — Kevin Plawecki and his no runs batted in to date (albeit in limited utility) came to bat, inspiring in me precisely as much confidence as Cabrera had. Without irony or desire to be adorable, I said the exact same thing to Stephanie about Kevin as I had Asdrubal: “This guy is never going to get a big hit for us this year.”
Color me a satisfied shade of corrected when KP did his duty and drove in a pair with a single before optimistically getting himself thrown out at second. I guess you can spell his last name with two RBI. Hurrah for being shown up! The Mets led 2-0; the Marlins, despite their innate despicability, weren’t imitating their manager in terms of causing their lumber to smolder; and now all that needed to be done to get the Mets headed to Cleveland in relatively fine fettle (the only kind of fettle anybody ever embraces) was the stitching together of six outs.
The first out, in the top of the eighth, was a simple fly ball to left, preceded by a leap and dive into the stands by the left fielder who makes nothing simple, which previews as alternately pleasing and horrifying where the next 154 games are concerned.
My, but does Yoenis Cespedes add spice to every facet of the action.
In this case, Ichiro Suzuki lifted a pop fly into the shallow seats down the line. It didn’t appear from my suite perspective, also out in left, that it was catchable. It appeared different to Yoenis, who threw himself into his pursuit with such force that it looked like he might crash through the grandstand and plummet down to the primeval salt marshes below. He didn’t catch the ball and he didn’t rise immediately. All who watched assumed he was out for the season, because these are the Mets, who were 2-5, and how is it plausible that anything that could go wrong wouldn’t go wrong?
Nothing went wrong. Yo swore he was only a little sore, but was otherwise just swell…so swell, that he made the putout on Ichiro when play resumed. That pitch was thrown by Blevins, whose charge is retiring lefthanded batters. The last one he’d face would be Christian Yelich, who’d single. With Giancarlo Stanton emerging from the on-deck circle, Blevins would have to exit, and into the game would come not Addison Reed (too exhausted), not Rafael Montero (too untrustworthy), but Jeurys Familia.
You might recognize Familia from such films as Matz Was Knocked Out Early and We Were Short In The Pen Tonight. Where you were used to seeing him was in save situations, which have been sparse in 2016 and too often come with their own set of confining constraints. Familia had pitched in defeats Saturday, Monday and Tuesday (none of the losses his doing). With an off day to follow on Thursday, it wasn’t necessarily demanding to ask him to go an inning on Wednesday. It was, however, surprising to find him asked to go an inning and two-thirds. Jeurys’s arm is, as much as any limb, the Mets’ ticket to ride. You don’t want to ride it into the ground.
Then again, you didn’t want to lose a fifth consecutive game and discover that Panic City had passed a town charter. The occasion of a 2-0 lead and the absence of anybody better-suited to protect it five outs shy of victory called for a certain style of Jeurys prudence on Terry’s part. It would be preferable to save Familia’s innings for down the road. The preference would be irrelevant if the road led off a cliff before the middle of April. “We had to win this game to get us going,” the skipper said afterwards, fully cognizant that 2-6, à la Dean Wormer’s advice to Flounder regarding “fat, drunk and stupid,” is no way to go through life.
Thus, Familia. And thus the most must-win eighth game a season has ever known. The eighth inning of the eighth game wasn’t clean — after retiring Stanton, Familia allowed consecutive hits that plated Yelich — but the Mets still led at inning’s end, 2-1. And when the Mets didn’t score in the bottom of the eighth, Jeurys came back for more thin-ice Marlin fishing in the ninth. Nevertheless, he reeled those suckers in 1-2-3 and snapped the losing streak. The Mets were winners again, packing a 3-5 record ahead of their nine-game road trip, a mark that isn’t at all impressive when compared to a tray of Shake Shack or reasonable expectations, but bloody brilliant when stacked against what could have been a whole lot worse.
