AN UGLY REVIEW
BIZARRE REPLAY ADDS INSULT TO METS’ LATEST LOSS
THE ODD, eerie part was the silence. It was overwhelming. It was deafening. It was everywhere, even as the Pirates started stomping on the Mets like grapes in a vineyard, the lead growing, 2-0 to 5-1 to 8-1 to 11-1.
This is when you can feel a season spinning sideways regardless of what the calendar says, when the anger is gone and the fury dissolves and a crowd of 35,323 can’t even bring itself to boo. Stepford Stadium. That’s bad in late September. It’s death in early June.
“When the offense is going well, the pitching’s not there …” Michael Conforto said, on one side of the Mets’ clubhouse.
“… and when the pitching’s going well, we aren’t hitting,” Neil Walker said, finishing the thought all the way on the other side of the room.
Nothing psychic going on there, by the way. That’s just how it is right now for the Mets. That’s how it is for teams that can never get the engine fired, that can never get the season pushing in the right direction. Let’s say it as it is: That’s how it is for bad baseball teams.
“One step forward and two steps back,” Walker said. “On good teams it’s going to come back and even out. That hasn’t happened for us yet.”
The implication is that Walker believes it will, that Walker and the others in the room still fancy the Mets a good team even after two solid months of evidence that would suggest otherwise, even as we keep waiting for the 10-game winning streak to materialize that everyone in the organization steadfastly believes is just around the corner.
“We’re not going to fold up the tents,” Terry Collins said.
They can start with a new slogan, something along the lines of “Six days of gain, one day of rain,” because the Mets could use a few Sundays off. This 11-1 slog against the Pirates means the cumulative score for twoplus months of Sundays reads this way for the National League portion of New York City baseball: Opponents 78, Mets 37. And here’s the thing: If you’ve watched that steaming slaughterhouse week to week, that almost seems closer than these Sundays have been.
There are other troubling trends: nine straight losses to end series, for starters. Seven wins and 10 losses in one-run games. Twenty-three save opportunities and only 12 saves. Four wins and 12 losses against teams with winning records (with a bunch on the near horizon). Four wins and 11 losses in day games … On and on and on and on and … “This,” Walker said, “has to stop.”
And yet he said this as the Mets added one last bizarre coda to a homestand that will go down in the annals as one of the zaniest ever, from Mr. Met’s digits to the ball boy’s fidgets to Sunday afternoon when the fans were treated to a bonus seventh-inning stretch since the first one was rendered moot by a questionable review called for by the Pirates.
And why not? It seems Walker didn’t touch second base while turning a 5-4-3 double play (even though the runner, Josh Harrison, peeled off well before the play). They played “God Bless America” and “Lazy Mary,” all the seventh-inning favorites, before finally peeking at the replay. Because of course it happened like that.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Walker said.
Actually, that little bit of umpiring slapstick was the one thing that did seem to draw the crowd from its slumber, which was about as awful an indictment as you can level against the Mets right now. If the anger and the fury have been beaten out of fan base who delights in being angry and furious — and with one game less than twothirds of a season still to go — where does that leave you as a team?
It leaves you flying to Dallas-Fort Worth for a pair against a team in the Rangers that has had a mirror season to theirs, then on to Atlanta for four against a Braves team that, somehow, on Monday morning wakes with a better record than the Mets.
Steven Matz and Seth Lugo are coming back. Maybe Yoenis Cespedes will be back by the weekend. The reinforcements are on their way, with 107 games left to play. Can that make any kind of impact? It’s a fair question. Here’s another one:
Does anyone at Stepford Stadium still care?