Laughingstocks no more, Mets poised for playoff run
There’s this Twitter hashtag you’re probably familiar with if you’ve spent any time on the site: #LOLMets.
It encompasses many things, both process and outcomes that have dogged the team for nearly a decade, not to mention large segments of the 40-plus seasons before that. But perhaps the simplest way to describe it is this: Something unorthodox happens, thanks to failures of planning, followed in short order by the worst possible outcome.
So the Bobby Bonilla contract is #LOLMets not because they deferred money on a deal, as many other major league teams have, but because they invested it with Bernie Madoff, and poof, that money’s gone. And the Jason Bay signing is #LOLMets because they let him get on an airplane while concussed, and Bay never recovered. And it’s extra #LOLMets because that happened a year after they did the same thing with Ryan Church.
It happens in ways large and small. Jeremy Reed, put at first base without experience there, loses a game to the Los Angeles Dodgers by throwing away an easy play at the plate. The Mets deal six players for J.J. Putz, decline to put him through detailed medicals, have him pitch through pain, and he blows out his arm. And so on. If you are reading this publication, you probably know about #LOLMets in some way.
So what made the Mets’ weekend sweep of the Washington Nationals — and what looks like a very real playoff pursuit — so artful, so very Mets, wasn’t some departure from the #LOLMets ethos. No, instead, what made a weekend at Citi Field so special — the home park finally felt like Shea Stadium did when the Mets intermittently thrilled their fans — was all those moments came along, Mets fans braced for impact, and then something great happened instead.
Witness Wilmer Flores. It was spectacularly #LOLMets to see Flores out at shortstop, crying for several innings Wednesday night as the team agreed to a deal with the Milwaukee Brewers for Carlos Gomez. A disconnect between management and Terry Collins, the team manager, meant Collins had no inkling of the trade. And an odd Collins response to this was to let Flores, informed by a fan he was on his way to Milwaukee, stay out at shortstop to try to regain his composure in front of the baseball world’s eyes.
The trade, of course, didn’t happen. The Brewers said it fell apart over the Mets’ concerns about paying Gomez’s reasonable $9 million 2016 salary. The Mets swore up and down it because Gomez had a suspect hip, though subsequent events — from the Mets’ failure to add any 2016 payroll at the deadline to the notoriously finicky-on-injuries Houston Astros happily gobbling Gomez up for a king’s ransom in prospects — certainly support Milwaukee’s version of events.
So instead, the Mets kept Flores, a talented young player whose development has been stunted by putting him at shortstop, a position he shouldn’t play made vacant by a team unable to afford a suitable alternative. Flores is at second base now. He also has become a cult hero, given a standing ovation every time he came to bat this weekend.
And the last time he did so on Friday night in the 12th inning of a game the Mets desperately needed, he homered. He drove in both runs against the Nationals that night, he made a diving stop at second base, cementing himself as a folk hero for as long as he puts on Mets orange and blue (and imagine the public backlash if they ever try to trade him now).
#LOLMets process. Miracle Mets outcome.
So it went all weekend. Saturday night, Lucas Duda hit two homers. Duda is at first base full time primarily because the Mets, for years, had two first basemen in Duda and Ike Davis and repeatedly chose Davis over Duda. Poor Duda went to left field, then right field, giving it his best, lumbering around the vast expanse and putting up the worst defensive numbers in baseball because the Mets couldn’t afford to add outfielders. And only when Davis was diagnosed with valley fever (a very #LOLMets thing to happen to someone, by the way) and ultimately shipped to the Pittsburgh Pirates was Duda given the first base job, temporarily, by default.
He hit 30 home runs in 2014. He’s on pace to beat that this year. He’s the first Met since 1962 to hit nine home runs in eight days. He inexplicably even figured out how to hit lefties this season, and so when National manager Matt Williams walked new acquisition Yoenis Cespedes to get to Duda on Saturday night, the would-be castoff drilled a double into the left-center-field gap to put the Mets ahead to stay and push the Citi Field crowd to another level, one they might not have remembered they had since squeezing through the narrow Shea corridors for the occasional October.
So it goes across this roster. The ace is Jacob deGrom, once shopped by the front office. Cespedes could only be afforded because the long-term icon, David Wright, has been injured for so long that the Mets received much of his 2015 salary back through insurance. Jenrry Mejia, in a truly #LOLMets moment, got suspended for a second time for the same performance-enhancing drug, reportedly testing positive for it while serving his first suspension. Could the financially compromised Mets owners have added Cespedes’ 2015 salary without the $2.39 million Mejia will no longer receive in 2015? Who knows?
But that’s how it all went down. The team’s best player, lost to injury, and the team’s 2014 closer, lost to self-inflicted career jeopardy, allowed Sandy Alderson to add an elite hitter in Cespedes, two other important offensive cogs in Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson, and a late-inning reliever in Tyler Clippard. The misfortune might be precisely what helps the Mets win the National League East.
So there was much joy in Citi Field on Sunday night, with the Mets exploding for three home runs in four batters. First Curtis Granderson, written off by so many after a difficult 2014, not only hitting as well as any nonDuda Met in 2015 but acquitting himself nicely in center field Saturday night. Then Daniel Murphy, the oft-shopped infielder who has filled in wherever the Mets have needed him — and through years the Mets have needed so much. And finally Duda, the offensive force who says so little but has been hitting so much.
An unexpected pennant race is here. Fans cheering, screaming, having a great time at the ballpark with their band of rejected heroes, making the vaunted Washington Nationals sweat.
All you can do is laugh. #LOLMets. Finally.