Soul Searching, Celebration Discovering, and Most Importantly: Max!

I have a mental block about Game 1 of the Nationals “Rip You Off Doubleheader Special, Brought To You By Buffoonery”. Partly because of said buffoonery. Partly because the Mets lost. And partly because it was Mother’s Day and I was with my mother, as good sons and daughters tend to spend this day. My mother is special because she not only put the game on for me, but made sure she yelled and screamed like a loon when Michael Perez got his fourth hit of the game, and Brandon Nimmo also singled to put Jeff McNeil up with the go ahead runs on base. She also cursed like a loon when Alex Call caught up to McNeil’s drive towards the gap which ended the game. If you can’t appreciate that on Mother’s Day, then your heart is coal and there’s no saving you.

So for those reasons, I don’t have a lot to say about Saturday’s game which bled into Sunday because the Nationals, the umpires, and Major League Baseball like to dabble in incompetence. But speaking of dabbling in incompetence, I’ll say this: If Michael Perez goes 4-for-4, and your pieced together pitching staff of Joey Meatballs, Stephen Nogosek, Dominic Leone, and Dennis Santana gives up three runs to a major league baseball team, and you can’t win that game? Then my friends, you have souls to search for.

In their between game soul searching session, they found two things. The first thing they found was a revelation:

Daniel Vogelbach was asked to describe what it feels like to not be able to score runs as a team after getting runners on:

"Yeah, hitting is hard…we got another one in two hours and we can't really dwell on why things aren't going the way we want them to go" pic.twitter.com/q6yPwVPuVc

— SNY (@SNYtv) May 14, 2023

Well damn, Daniel’s right. Hitting is hard. It’s harder than it was in 2022, apparently. But acknowledging reality could open up a path to a deeper consciousness. For the Mets, acknowledging that hitting is hard could be the first hurdle to success. With Max Scherzer coming back in Game 2, it was as good a time as any to find that deeper consciousness.

And Max looked good in Game 2. He didn’t give up a run in the first, which was a first for the Mets in eight games, which was a great start. Speaking of great start, Max lasted five innings which is great for many reasons, even if not in the most obvious definition of great as Max Scherzer has known throughout his career. His off speed stuff was nasty, and his fastball had pop. Five innings may not be a great start as we know it to be, but for Max, it’s a great re-start.

In the top of the 5th, Starling Marte led off against Jake Irvin with a single, and then Mark Canha opened the spigots with an RBI double to make it 1-1, and that’s when we discovered the second thing the Mets found: A new celebration!

Mark Canha with a double and we have a tied ballgame! pic.twitter.com/fONXB99TXC

— SNY (@SNYtv) May 14, 2023

Pro tip for Mark Canha: if a media member asks you the genesis of that celebration, you simply say “that stays in the clubhouse.” The last thing the Mets need now is for you, or even one of your teammates, to actually explain that. Because if the answer is something along the lines of: “We’re not machines. We’re going to struggle 7 times out of 10. It just feels bad when I strike out and fans tell me to kiss my ass, you know it doesn’t really get to me but I want to let them know that when we’re successful, we’re going to tell them to kiss our ass to let them know how it feels”, then it’s just best that we don’t know.

In fact, “hitting is hard” sounds like that could have started a rant that would have been a lot like the above adaptation of Javy Baez’s honesty from 2021. But if that really is a “kiss my ass, fans”, then I for one want you to keep doing it, because it worked! Once Baez let us know that we were getting booed, Sandy Alderson made them stop and the Mets missed the playoffs. So if that’s a dig at us, then by all means, don’t admit it. We need that celebration. We deserve that celebration (in more ways than one.)

The Mets springboarded off of that double by Canha to score eight runs in the 5th inning to lead them to victory. Brandon Nimmo took advantage of the Nats’ defensive positioning to drive in a run, Francisco Lindor squibbed a ball down the third base line for another run, they got a Brett Baty walk for a 4th run, then a 5th and 6th run on a Texas Leaguer by Marte, a 7th run on an error by the catcher, and then the 8th run came on another hit by Canha.

Nothing that happened outside of Canha wasn’t littered with a little luck. So if that celebration, no matter what it means, works? Then by all means, come to our houses nightly and yell KISS MY ASS before you go home for the night. Fans always say they want to contribute to a team’s success, so if this is our contribution? We’ll roll with it. Whatever works. We want to help get you to the playoffs, if verbal abuse is what it takes.

(And if that doesn’t work, perhaps Deepak Chopra can be the new hitting coach. I bet you’ll find a deeper consciousness then.)

In all seriousness, I’m glad Max looked good. Whatever other questions you want to ask about this team going forward, whether it be will the team start hitting again, will Vientos or Mauricio come up, who will the Mets trade for, or anything else, none of those answers will move the needle as much as “will Max be Max again”. Beecause if Max is Max, then 83 wins is the floor. If Max is Dylan Bundy, or he gets hurt again, then 83 wins is the ceiling. So today’s option is the best news that Mets fans have gotten in a long time.