One — and maybe only — positive of Brodie’s 1st debacle of a season
THEY TRY to cheapen this with baseballs that sure look juiced, with strike zones that sure seem to be shrinking. They try to make home runs less and less special because more and more guys who shouldn’t be launching these rockets are sending them off into orbit. And yet the slugger still commands attention. And so for Mets fans, across the rest of another rotten season of failed expectation, there will be Pete Alonso. There were 34,247 of them at Citi Field on Sunday afternoon, and they were sent into an instant slumber when Zack Wheeler surrendered four first-inning runs.
By the sixth it was 6-0 and Aaron Nola was painting corners and kneecapping hitters and carrying a no-hitter through 5 ¹/₃ innings when he tried to snake Strike 3 past Alonso. But Alonso had faced Nola plenty back in college, back in the SEC, when Alonso was at Florida and Nola at LSU, and so he took a stance up in the box, trying to neutralize Nola’s breaking stuff.
Three-hundred-ninety-six feet later, the opposite way, he had.
“He’s just a slugger,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said, shaking his head. “I got lucky,” Alonso said. The fans? They knew it was another lost afternoon and yet, as the ball scraped against the blue July sky, they rose and they roared and they carried Alonso around the basepaths because sluggers still have the power to do that, to electrify dead baseball afternoons, to enliven even unwatchable baseball teams.
He got lucky for the 30th time already this year, tying a 43-year-old record by Dave Kingman for most home runs by a Met before the All-Star break, setting an NL rookie record with his 67th and 68th RBIs.
He has the power to make fans want to watch what the Mets have to offer in the second half. Sluggers are different that way. Adeiny Hechavarria hit a home run Sunday, too, to almost the same spot Alonso did. Nobody is buying a ticket in August or September to watch Adeiny Hechavarria swing a bat
The Mets employee who is truly lucky with what
Alonso has done these first 90 games is Brodie Van Wagenen, of course. Alonso represents one of the few things he’s done right in his maiden voyage as GM, bucking conventional wisdom and bringing Alonso north with the Mets rather than buying an extra year of salary control by keeping him in Syracuse a couple of weeks.
Sunday was an especially frisky day for Van Wagenen, two days after he made like Al Oerter and turned a Citi Field chair into a discus during a heated meeting with his coaches. His handiwork was all over the sport. Right here, at Citi Field, Jay Bruce was hitting two home runs, giving him three for the weekend and four, total, against the Mets so far. So there was that.
Four home runs — as in the total number for Robinson Cano in his first 242 at-bats as a Met. Cano also failed to snare a lazy pop-up off Scott Kingery’s bat leading off the first inning — in fairness, Juan Lagares probably should’ve been able to bail him out on the play, but it’s also the kind of play Cano used to make in his salad days. So there was that.
In Cleveland, the two cornerstone players of the Cano deal — Justin Dunn and Jarred Kelenic — played in the Futures Game by night and charmed a gaggle of local scribes by day with their poise and their candor, so there was that. In Tampa, Travis d’Arnaud — discarded by Van Wagenen like an empty beer can after all of 25 plate appearances this year, followed up his walk-off homer against the Yankees by getting another hit, scoring another run and making a terrific defensive play at first. So there was that.
And as a report surfaced that the Mets had “asked around” about Joe Girardi, favorite Van Wagenen whipping boy Mickey Callaway was still the Mets manager and he was still carving optimistic gems postgame despite the Mets dropping to an unsightly 40-50 on the year (One-and-a-half games better than last year at the break [39-52]! Two-and-a-half better than 2017 [39-53]! Progress!).
“I feel we can still make a run at this thing,” Callaway said. So there was that. Mostly, there is Alonso, the one thing Van Wagenen has touched that hasn’t turned to rust (unless you count him NOT trading Jeff McNeil along with Dunn and Kelenic; at this point, Van Wagenen probably does include that in his own list “pros”). There is the prospect of more balls filling the sky, more balls filling the bleachers, more otherwise empty nights given a morsel of hope thanks to a slugger nicknamed Polar Bear.
That’s what the Mets have going for them heading into the second half, when they will invade Miami and, having been brushed aside by the three varsity teams in the NL East, will surely urge the Marlins “Come get us,” as they tangle for the JV trophy and fourth place. .