MORNING GLORY
Amazin’ skipper can’t get out of Callaway even when things are going well
ATLANTA — Seth Lugo put both hands on his head, the universal sign for can you even believe that just happened? Because I cannot believe that just
happened, and the folks inside SunTrust Park began to bark and howl and cheer and chant.
And if you could have taken an audio snapshot of Mickey Callaway’s brain at the moment it became official the Mets would lose this Memorial Day Mess 4-3, it probably sounded something like this: “WHAT. THE. [HECK]!”
Right now, the manager of the Mets is Mush from “A Bronx Tale,” unable to pick a winning horse in a one-horse race. He is Bernie Lootz, William H. Macy’s character in “The Cooler,” but in Lootz’s case he was paid to be a cooler, paid to rob rabbits’ feet and foil fourleaf clovers and otherwise neutralize all forms of good luck.
Right now, Mickey Callaway is having a hell of a time getting out of his own way.
Just about everything he touches turns to zinc. “We just lost it,” Callaway said. They did the first game of Monday’s holiday day-night doubleheader, and perhaps it was karmic reward for having to wait 2 hours and 57 minutes to start a nightcap that ended at 1:28 Tuesday morning, but the Mets did get one back later on, 8-5.
But it was the first game that fostered a dyspepsia that is becoming as frequent as it is alarming. The Mets got another Cy Young-level effort from Jacob deGrom, and they wasted it, and somehow, the Mets are 5-6 in deGrom’s starts and are 2-5 in his last seven outings despite pitching to a 0.45 ERA. So that isn’t exactly a happy place to start.
But lately, every move Callaway
makes — especially when it comes to his five-alarm bullpen — has been the wrong one. That doesn’t mean they were foolish, or illplanned. They just always seem to go sideways.
This time, it was choosing to ask Seth Lugo to pitch two innings. According to Callaway, he was either going to pitch two in the opener (if deGrom went seven) or he would start and pitch the first two innings of the nightcap (if deGrom scuffled and he had to mix and match earlier).
Is that a little unconventional, considering the Mets employ a closer in Jeurys Familia who saved 51 games just two years ago — though he came through for a twoinning save in the nightcap? Maybe. But after a weekend in Milwaukee in which Callaway stubbornly kept bringing in Jerry Blevins in relief of Robert Gsellman to face — and get slapped around by — lefties, there had arisen a sense that maybe Callaway should be less of a push-button, color-by-numbers manager.
And this wasn’t an absurd choice: Lugo entered the game as the bullpen’s rock, unscored upon in his prior 17 innings. And while that streak ended quickly after a bunt, a single and a sacrifice fly to open the eighth, erasing the 2-1 lead deGrom had safeguarded, Lugo was handed a mulligan when Devin Mesoraco hit a go-ahead home run to start the top of the ninth.
Now, understand, there remain plenty of Mets fans who have screamed for years that there doesn’t have to be a hard-andfast rule to deprive your eighthinning guy a shot at the ninth, voices that elevate whenever Familia has one of his periodic ninth-inning misadventures.
So Lugo stayed in, and promptly walked the leadoff man, .213-hitting Johan Camargo. He retired Dansby Swanson on a fly. Now up stepped Charlie Culberson, who hadn’t hit a home run since 2016 and ….
And he hit a home run. Game over. There were dark clouds all over Atlanta on Monday, and it was something of a minor miracle they got both games in. They don’t all hover over the head of the Mets’ manager. It just seems that way right now.
“Things just aren’t going our way,” he said. “We’ll snap out of it eventually.”
The 11-1 start is such a distant memory it seems impossible that Choo Choo Coleman wasn’t a part of it. The good vibes that surrounded this team in April have been ransacked in May, which can’t end soon enough for the Mets.
“The way things are going,” Callaway said, “I feel real good that we’re 25-25.”
He felt a little better nine hours later when they were back above sea level at 26-25. For once the dark skies brightened a sliver for the Mets’ Mush.