OFF THE RAILS
Noah gets scratched from start; Familia heads off to DL Gardy ends miserable Met day with HR off deGrom in Subway opener
Jacob deGrom allows game-winning HR to Brett Gardner (inset, celebrating with Aaron Judge) as Yankees beat Mets, 4-1, hours after Amazin’s find out that Noah Snydergaard won’t pitch Sunday due to ‘swelling’ in right index finger and Jeurys Familia heads to DL with shoulder woes.
It’s hard to imagine how baseball life could be much more depressing for the Mets right now.
Their abysmal offense hangs over every game, making defeat seem inevitable even on nights like this one, when their first hitter of the game went deep, when their ace was in typical brilliant form.
Somehow, someway, the Mets are going to find a way to lose these days, and while nobody was saying that in the clubhouse after getting beat, 4-1, by the Yankees, the sense of doom apparently spread all the way to Trenton, N.J., where Yoenis Cespedes made a rather stunning declaration after his Double-A rehab game.
“For the way the team is playing right now,” Cespedes said to reporters in Trenton, “even if I’m doing very well, if the team remains playing this way, I don’t think it’s going to help, but I’m eager to get back.”
Just what his teammates want to hear, no doubt.
Such is life these days for the Mets, which makes the timing of the Subway Series all the more difficult for them. They’re forever the little brother in this intra-city rivalry, if you can really call it that, and sight of the Yankees as a juggernaut these days only adds to their misery.
Wasn’t it only about five minutes ago the Mets seemed poised to own the city for at least a few years? Except their run as a perennial contender ended with the same speed with which the Yankees conducted a rebuild on the fly, and suddenly these franchises are speeding in opposite directions again.
The Yankees keep finding ways to win, seemingly getting big home runs from somebody different every night — Brett Gardner doing the heavy lifting on this night with a two-run shot off Jacob deGrom in the eighth inning to break a 1-1 tie.
They’re now 41-18 and if the Mets win even one game in this series, it will feel like a miracle.
It’s not only that the team in Queens has now lost seven straight and 12 of 14, but the injury news continues to get worse as well. Before Friday’s game came word that Jeurys Familia was going on the disabled list with a sore shoulder and Noah Syndergaard wasn’t ready to come off the DL to pitch Sunday, as the Mets had hoped.
At that point if they could cling to any optimism at all, it was having deGrom on the mound Friday night.
As usual, however, the Mets did their best to sabotage their ace. Even after Brandon Nimmo went deep leading off the first inning, the bats went silent again, and then Adrian Gonzalez’s error on the most routine of ground balls by Masahiro Tanaka wound up costing deGrom a run, tying the game 1-1 in the sixth inning.
For a long time it looked like deGrom might rise above it all, pitching with brilliance and efficiency deep into the game, but one mistake-pitch wound up costing him, as he hung a 1-0 changeup that Gardner pulled over the right-field fence in the eighth inning for a two-run home run. And that was that. Afterward deGrom didn’t want to be hear about lack of support. He blamed himself for the loss, saying, “I made a mistake there. At 1-1 I wanted to get the guys back in the dugout and get another chance to score.”
Yes, you have to admire deGrom’s attitude through all of his hard-luck pitching. He has a league-leading 1.57 ERA and he hasn’t even hinted at being frustrated on anything but a team level.
Yet his teammates, to a man, make a point of saying how awful they feel that they can’t score runs for him.
“He’s pitching his heart out,” Todd Frazier said. “You can feel his energy when he’s out there. Maybe we’re trying too hard for him because we want to score so badly for him.”
In truth, of course, it’s not just when deGrom pitches anymore. They’ve scored three runs in their last 51 innings and been held to one run or fewer in five consecutive games, which ties them for the longest such stretch in franchise history. And then there are the injuries. For years you could argue the Mets should have been doing more regarding injuries. Indeed, sometimes it seemed their bad luck was some sort of karma due to the well-documented mistakes they’ve made in handling various medical issues.
But after making significant changes in the offseason, from incorporating more advanced injury prevention methods to hiring a performance director to coordinate medical and conditioning data, treatment, etc., the Mets finally seem to be doing everything right.
Yet the injuries keep coming, and the Mets are paying more heavily than other teams because of the lack of depth in the organization.
After all, the Yankees dealt with all sorts of key injuries themselves early this season but their depth of talent allowed them to overcome and now thrive.
Not the Mets. The misery mounts by the day.