DON’T ‘JUST SMILE’ GET MAD!
Mets can’t look at bright side during horrific slump
There is no sugarcoating it. The Mets are missing their swagger. They look lifeless at the plate, striking out on fastballs in sleepy at-bats. Spoiling rallies before they even begin. Appearing motionless and quiet in the dugout. Right now, the Mets have all the energy of a bear hibernating in the winter. They’re the couch potatoes of the NL East.
Francisco Lindor said the dog days of August baseball are to blame for the Mets’ disengaged and disjointed performances of late. The guys are tired. They’ve played 111 games. The results will come.
It has led to the worst stretch of the Mets’ season. They’ve gone 9-15 since the All-Star break, 1-6 on their recent road trip, got swept by the Phillies, and lost four in a row. They opened August in first place with a cushy four-game lead, but plummeted to third place below the Phillies and Braves.
The losses are piling up, the frustration from the fan base is nearing a boiling point, and what have the Mets said or done to convince anyone still willing to watch or listen that things will change?
“Just smile,” Pete Alonso said on Sunday after Zack Wheeler pitched a two-hit shutout to cap the Phillies’ sweep. “You get to watch baseball.”
Oh, good grief. The Mets need to wake up.
After seeing the Mets free-fall out of first place, failing to hold a lead at any point in four games, Alonso is claiming the ineptitude we all saw in South Philly was actually... baseball?
After Wheeler pitched a two-hit shutout against his former team, the response from a first baseman who animated the league with 53 home runs in his rookie year was: “It is what it is.”
Where is the fire? Where is the fury? It sure as hell ain’t in the Mets clubhouse.
The Mets stranded 61 men on base in their past seven games and 175 since the All-Star break, most in the majors. They batted .153 with runners in scoring position on the road trip against the Marlins and Phillies. The Mets have the fewest RBI (254) with runners in scoring position in the majors. Their 3.7 runs scored per game is ranked 29th out of 30 teams in MLB.
The Mets offense has been hard to watch, overmatched, and zombie-like for more than three months since the front office fired hitting coach Chili Davis. But the excuses from this team are seemingly infinite. “To be honest, we’ve had a lot of games in a row,” Alonso said on Sunday. Uh, the Phillies just completed 26 games in 26 days, and now they’re
in first place.
Instead of focusing on snapping out of it, the team’s takeaway after its uninspiring start to the second half is “we tried our best, we’re working hard, but we’re running into bad luck.”
“Believe in us,” Alonso said on Sunday. “We’re all in this together. Just smile, and know that we got this.”
Why would Mets fans believe that they “got this” when the team hasn’t sniffed the playoffs in half a decade? Even Dominic Smith, when asked about the Mets’ thenworst offense in MLB in late June, said: “When you’re in first place you can’t be too concerned.” Apparently, when you’re in third place, you can’t be too concerned, either.
Given the clumsy comments spoken by everyone but James McCann, who appropriately said the Mets “can’t make excuses” and “got to own it,” it’s hard to blame players like Alonso and Smith for sporting this kind of laissez-faire attitude when it’s being fed to them by the Mets’ top leaders.
Steve Cohen, who still hasn’t had his phone taken away from him as Mets owner, traveled to Philly and tweeted: “I just visited the players in the clubhouse. They are ready and in a good frame of mind for this game.” Cohen’s visit, which took place before they lost 3-0 to Wheeler and the Phillies, included telling the Mets he was extremely proud of them for showing up every day and playing with heart.
Then manager Luis Rojas, drunk with optimism even after his team just lost four in a row for the first time all season, found it within himself to say: “This is a special group. We’re not going to stop saying that, ever. Nothing more than positive support will help the players play at their best.”
Instead of handing out participation trophies, maybe the Mets’ top leaders should try offering something new: The plain hard truth.
For starters, a large dose of urgency and a little bit of panic in mid-August can only help a team with a swagger-less, “It is what it is,” attitude. Enough with the platitudes and start talking about the intangibles, like taking responsibility and being accountable for an underperforming offense. Let the Mets become unhinged and outraged by their embarrassing results.
As cheerless as all of this has sounded, the Mets still have a few reasons to be hopeful. There is still time to bring their season back to life.
The Mets entered Monday, their last off-day before playing 10 straight games against the Dodgers and Giants, trailing the Phillies by 2.5 games. They have 51 games remaining to climb back up to the top of an NL East division that has proven it can be mediocre.
There’s the prospect of Jacob deGrom potentially returning from injury in September. There’s the possibility of the most dynamic double-play duo in baseball showing off in Queens once Francisco Lindor returns from an oblique strain and joins his childhood friend, Javier Baez, in the diamond.
There’s the fact the Mets managed to sit in first place for 90 days despite everything going wrong — injuries to nearly the entire Opening Day roster, adversity in the form of double-digit doubleheaders, and their two-time Cy Young award winner battling maladies all season.
The messy Mets have surprised all year. They can surprise us again by changing up their offensive approach, being furious with the way the past few weeks have gone and finding them unacceptable rather than merely saying, “It’s just baseball.” They only have so many years left of deGrom at his best. And if they can get into the playoffs with their ace healthy again, the Mets have as good a shot as anyone to pull it off. The first step is waking the hell up.