Raise That Hunk Of Metal

I mean, this was our World Series, right?

If baseball had an in-season tournament for teams where all they needed to so was not embarrass themselves on national television, the Mets would have won this season, right? 34-3 over the first three games, I would have been happy if the Mets had just gone out and lost a boring 5-3 game. But the way it started, where the Braves immediately put three on the board against Kodai Senga in the first inning, it looked like there was going to be another massacre, narrated by Karl Ravech with Buster Olney as the background dancer.

But Kodai Senga recovered from that to shut the Braves down for the next five innings and give the Mets a quality start. And thanks to a fifth inning that saw Braves pitchers lose the strike zone and Rafael Ortega get two hits in an inning (you read that right), the Mets scored just enough runs to make the inevitable Braves comeback fall just short as they avoided a Braves sweep and an ESPN embarrassment by a score of 7-6. Sean Murphy hit a home run that resulted in a woman pushing people out of the way so she can curse out the Braves fan that came up with the ball, and Brooks Raley had problems wtih the pitch com which was quickly followed by him giving up a home run to Matt Olson which knocked out one of the Galaxy 16 KU-band satellites.

But Adam Ottavino, who can’t have runners on base or else he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West, pitched a 1-2-3 inning to save the day and save the Mets from a final indignity, setting off a celebration that will surely go deep into the night … by maybe two or three of the fans that were there tonight. The players just showered and went home without having to worry about beer bottles flying at Vogelbach’s car. But if there was a celebration with a trophy, it would have been the “We Avoided a Sweep Memorial Trophy”, or maybe the “Anthony Young Chalice”. Or perhaps the “We’re Sorry If This Win Caused Your Draft Position To Go From 6 to 17 Hunk Of Metal.” Something like that.

Raise it high. whatever you call it.

***

Mike Puma of the Post came out and said that Justin Verlander was a diva while he was here.

“A Met told Puma that Verlander was a “diva” who was detached from his Mets teammates and complained about how the team’s analytics department was not at the level as the one he worked with during his first stint with the Astros. And it was that “diva” attitude caused Scherzer to grumble some about Verlander.”

I guess that’s why Verlander was a part of the purge, I guess.

The one thing that people seemed to notice just be watching on television was that the constant conversations about baseball by the starting pitchers when they left the game seemed to stop. I also thought I read somewhere (maybe it was a drunken tweet, er sorry Elon … post) was that Verlander seemed to spend more time pointing at his family in the stands than talking to his teammates. Who knows how much of that was true or what it all meant to the performance of the team. When you lose three starting pitchers from the rotation (Walker, Bassitt, deGrom), the dynamics are bound to change.

But I doubt that the end of the pitcher conversations and whatever level of diva that Justin Verlander may have been caused the performances of 7-10 players on the roster, Scherzer included. And if it did, then the Mets were more fragile than anyone realized.

Today’s Hate List

1. Ozzie Albies
2. Ozzie Albies
3. Ozzie Albies
4. Ozzie Albies
5. Ozzie Albies