First & foremost
Mets announcers avoid obvious remedy for Scherzer dominance
HEY, I just work here. They tell me to watch the games then write what I think. My qualification? Experience. I can recall when home-run hitters were too far past first to highfive first base coaches. I’m so old — and unoriginal — I remember when the Dead Sea was just sick.
So here’s what I think: Major League Baseball, which has been trending illogical since Fay Vincent was deposed in 1992, has never made less sense than it does now.
Friday was another of those crazy, crazy nights. On SNY, the Mets faced a familiar fee-fi foe, Nationals’ pitcher Max Scherzer. Scherzer’s a strikeout guy — 17 against the Mets in a no-hitter two seasons ago — who throws firstpitch strikes.
So the Mets did what they always do against Scherzer: They looked at first-pitch strikes. They stood and watched the most predictable pitch Scherzer throws, the one they’re most likely to hit, as if their plan, again, was to attack Scherzer by getting behind in the count.
In the fourth, Gary Cohen repeated a graphic showing Scherzer had thrown 11-of-12 first-pitch strikes. Okay, so then why weren’t the Mets, yet again, prepared to swing at his first pitch? Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez didn’t bring that up.
The Nats were prepared to swing at first-pitch strikes. They took a 1-0 lead on Matt Wieters’s home run on a Steven Matz first pitch, while the Mets again tried to wear Scherzer down by getting behind and then striking out.
In the sixth, Jay Bruce hit a line single off Scherzer’s first pitch, but that was a case of the paranormal. In the seventh, with the Nats up, 4-0, SNY posted a graphic showing Scherzer having thrown first-pitch strikes to 21 of the Mets’ 24 batters.
Still, no word from the booth why the Mets again allowed Scherzer to do what he does best. If this were the military, the Mets would have been court-martialed for providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Again.
Then the kicker: In SNY’s postgame, Terry Collins said this about Scherzer: “You’d better be ready because he’s coming at you.”
Well, no fooling! But if he knows that and we know that, why doesn’t his team?
Sunday: Jacob deGrom’s first MLB home run was hit on a getahead first pitch. The Mets later took a 2-1 lead on a lined single by the .218-hitting, No. 8-batter Travis d’Arnaud — on the first pitch. They made it 4-1 on Michael Conforto’s first-pitch line-drive hit.
But as the late TV pitchman Billy Mays said, “But, wait, there’s more!”
Friday, Yanks-A’s on YES, followed. In the second, the A’s had Stephen Vogt on second, Yonder Alonso on third when just-up rookie Matt Chapman beat out a swinging roller to third to score Alonso. As Chapman’s first big league hit, the ball was taken out of play.
But wait. The Yankees issued a What The Heck replay challenge of the bang-bang at first, the kind of totally unintended challenge that nonetheless dominates its application and unplugs games.
YES’s replays clearly showed nothing clearly — much too close to reverse.
But then the ruling from MLB’s Downtown Manhattan Maybe Central: Chapman now was out. Hey, kid, give that ball back; you were out by 3,000 miles!
And then Ken Singleton, to John Flaherty, said, “I’ve got a question for you, Flash: Why [on a slow roller to third] is Stephen Vogt still on second base?”
“I don’t have an answer for ya,” Flaherty said.
I do. It’s that uncompleted sentence, again, the one that begins and ends with, “The game has changed” — as if that explains the senselessness.