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Life is good for Mets fans these days!
Just a couple of weeks ago my favorite baseball team was deep in the doldrums. At that point in mid-July they had scored fewer runs than just about every other team in Major League Baseball. Only the Chicago White Sox were more impoverished. They were dead last in hits per game, their team batting average the lowest in the majors. They had just stranded 25 runners in an 18-inning marathon on July 19, yet somehow managed to win. The Mets were almost Franciscan in their approach to the game. A spirit of poverty and humility pervaded this team, at least offensively. They were even kind to animals, 0-7 vs. the Cubs.
Yet they were almost miraculously only a couple of games back of the then-National-League-East-leading Washington Nationals. Much of the Mets’ success had been due to their superlative pitching staff, specifically young guns Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. But the offense was moribund.
As July came to a close and the trade deadline loomed, any optimism was tempered by trepidation. Despite the Mets’ proximity to first place, everyone understood the Nats were still missing some key ingredients due to injury. Those assets would be back soon and Mets fans, conditioned as we are to disappointment and despair, acknowledged our team had been keeping it close mostly by smoke and mirrors.
Indeed things seemed to bottom out the evening of July 28. That night the Mets attempted to engineer a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers, offering talented but sidelined young arm Zack Wheeler and underachieving but cradle Met second baseman/shortstop Wilmer Flores to the Brewers in exchange for star centerfielder and onetime Met Carlos Gomez. The move was intended to give Terry Collins’ club some much-needed offensive punch.
Things don’t stay secret in the world of instant social media for long, however, and soon rumors were flying all over Citifield even as the Mets were on the diamond, trailing the San Diego Padres 7-2 in the seventh inning. You know the rest. A visibly upset Flores, hearing the news he’d just been traded from a fan in the stands, openly and unashamedly wept on the field. True to Met idiom, the trade fell through in farcical fashion and two days later the suddenly rejuvenated Flores made a spectacular defensive play at his more accustomed position, second, against those first-place Nationals. And that was just the beginning of an evening right out of a Damon Runyon story. He broke a scoreless tie in the fourth inning with an RBI single, batting in the only run the Mets would muster through 10 innings. Then with the score tied 1-1 in the 12th, he hit an arcing, game-winning solo home run into the Flushing night thus earning a permanent place in Mets lore.
The Mets went on to sweep that series and as August began—with general manager Sandy Alderson’s astute acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes, a hard-slugging Cuban outfielder from the Detroit Tigers, and veteran Dominican third baseman Juan Uribe from the Atlanta Braves to add that offensive spark—they were on a roll.
Then the rain came. The Mets had lost the first two games to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the Aug. 14-16 home series but were competitive, nothing to be too concerned about. But a dark cloud hovered over Citifield for the final game, literally. That cloud burst with the game tied 1-1 after six innings. When the players returned the old Mets took the field. An apparently sure double play that went wildly awry was the impetus as the Mets imploded on their way to an unsettling 8-1 loss. Meanwhile, the Nats were playing even worse, six losses in a row, four and half games back.
Can the Mets hold on? September collapses have been as much a part of Mets lore as black cats and rally caps. Because of that history Met fans are prone to extreme degrees of skepticism. So I’ve decided to turn this enigmatic season into a kind of faith-building exercise.
As Jesus said, “If you have faith and don’t doubt, you can do this and much more. You can even say to this mountain ‘may you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen.”
Or as Tug McGraw more succinctly put it, “Ya gotta believe!”
