Middle finger an appropriate metaphor for franchise’s week from hell

ATLANTA — Generally speaking, I think the notion of jinxes is silly. Sure, I’ve had my fun with them, because they are wonderful writing devices and fans are always quick to look at the sky and shriek, “Why?!” when things go awry. That’s always easier than admitting your team stinks.

Generally speaking, I have always thought that Mets fans who claim to be the victimsof a jinx, or a hex, or a pox, or a curse, are especially puerile. The Mets? In the history of baseball, you could argue, no team has benefitted more from fate than the Mets, in both 1969 and 1986, two of the greatest miracles in the sport’s history.

Hell, their nickname was the Miracle Mets.

I stand by all of that.

But it is also becoming fairly easy to understand how Mets fans could start to believe in the notion of jinxes, and hexes, and poxes, especially after a day like Tuesday.

Tuesday was a day in which they lost twofifths of their starting rotation to finger injuries — not bad shoulders, not bum elbows; fin

gers — and then lost a pair of fourrun leads before finally getting good and walked-off by the Braves in the bottom of the ninth when Johan Camargo treated a 98 mph fastball from a kid Mets pitcher named Gerson Bautista like a floating shuttlecock, hitting the home run that delivered the Braves a numbing 7-6 win.

“Unfortunate,” is how Mickey Callaway, the manager, described the day.

“Real unfortunate,” was how Steven Matz, the Mets’ starter who wound up hurting the middle finger on his pitching hand with a flailing fourth-inning swing, described it.

Mets fans might have used other adjectives, and all of them apply. In seven days they have played eight games. In seven of them they have either led going into the ninth inning or led by multiple runs. They have lost six. They are 26-26, and even if the standings insist they are .500 this has the feel of a team already 10 games out and 10 games under .500. Every day is something else. This day started with the news that Noah Syndergaard had an MRI on the index finger of his pitching hand, and he’d be spending a shift on the DL while he recovers from a strained ligament in that finger. The good news is surgery isn’t required (around the Mets, that’s actually considered

great news), but a pitching staff already stretched thin was once again going to be leveraged to the hilt.

Except Matz was masterful for three innings and looked like he was going to back up six shutout innings in Milwaukee last Thursday with another sterling effort. And that couldn’t possibly have come at a better time, with the bullpen exhausted, with Synder-

gaard out, with the Mets so badly needing Matz to fulfill the visions they’ve been harboring for him for the better part of four years now.

And then he swung the bat.

And the bat helicoptered away, and Matz thought nothing of it, so little in fact that he promptly took the bat back in his hands and pounded out a double down the left-field line, good night all around for Matz …

Except as he stood on second, the finger started to throb.

And when he took the mound the next inning, it started to hurt.

And as he trudged off the mound you knew — you absolutely knew — that the Mets weren’t going to score enough runs, because the boulder had already started to rumble downhill, and it doesn’t take a jinx-addled fan to notice when a team is on a run from hell like this.

And so Paul Sewald gave back a couple of runs. Jerry Blevins, asked to throw two innings, cruised in getting the first five outs then, as has been his wont this year, never came close to retiring either Freddie Freeman or Nick Markakis, the two lefties that are supposed to be his reason for even being on the team. And in the eighth, poor Jacob Rhame was simply overmatched by the moment, and a 6-3 lead evaporated like a rain puddle in the desert.

And an already lousy day had turned positively surreal.

“Not ideal,” said Matz, he of the discomfort in his middle finger which, if you think about it, is the perfect injury for the 2018 Mets and their fans. Maybe you believe in jinxes, maybe you don’t, but odds are you’ve overused your middle finger while watching many of the first 52 games of this season.