Wow, what a week. Some smart guy wrote this, early last Thursday. Last Thursday. Before we found out Noah Syndergaard would miss that afternoon’s start. Before we watched Yoenis Cespedes hit a run-scoring double, but barely make it to second base with a pulled hamstring. Before a daunting weekend series in Washington, where the Mets would win two games, but leave town feeling like they’d lost three. Before we all saw Syndergaard get hurt for real. Before an offensive explosion which has seen the Mets take two of the first three in a four-game set in Atlanta. Ain’t baseball great?
You’ll forgive the Met fan his slight case of vertigo. So far in 2017, east is west, fair is foul. Nothing has gone the way it was expected, save for the venom directed at the Mets’ medical staff. Once again, the cold hand has passed through the Mets’ clubhouse and claimed several souls. Syndergaard, Cespedes, Lucas Duda, Steven Matz, Seth Lugo… need I go on? The Mets won’t make excuses for their at best uneven play and no one from the opposition is going to take pity on them – see “Nationals, Washington” for an advanced seminar on that subject – but this injury wave is notable. When your two best players are on the shelf, it takes some kind of effort to pull together and make it work. Somehow, sometimes, the Mets have been able to do that. They managed to balance that stinker in Washington by laying a pasting of their own on the Braves. One day down, one day up. The thing is, everything we thought coming into the season is, right now, out the window. This team, built on a vaunted young pitching staff, now must rely on its offense – as inconsistent as it’s been – to carry them for awhile until the pitchers get right, until Lugo and Matz return to give Jacob deGrom some help, until Matt Harvey figures himself out. Who saw that coming?
Once the season is over, the fan can look back at it as a whole and appreciate the nuances and subtleties to which the game lends itself. The fan can see where the year turned, where the spark was that got a pennant winner to take off, or the day the whole season went south. In the middle of it, though, you can’t tell where it’s going, though some in the MSM will try to proclaim they “know” exactly what will happen. There’s no way they can. As a cross-town announcer likes to say, “That’s baseball, Suzyn.” In the midst of this forest, we have no choice but to examine the trees. Right now, the Mets’ forest has some sprightly saplings side-by-side with some dead oaks. It’s the inconsistency that makes a fan crazy. So in one moment, we berate Harvey for not being what he once was, yet come off a hard-fought win yelping about how great this team can be. On the post-game show last night – the aforementioned 16-6 drubbing of Atlanta – the “experts” where braying about how “you have to like what you see from the Mets right now.” The night before – off a 9-7 loss to these same Braves – the talk was all grave and dire about how the season was quickly circling the drain. The fans are no different; I have a Twitter feed to prove it.
We’re all a bit dizzy.
Follow me on Twitter @CharlieHangley.
The beauty of the 162-game season.
You’re never as good as you look when everything’s going right and you’re never as bad as you look when things are falling apart all around you.
I don’t think Ryan Zimmerman is going to be the best player in baseball this season and let’s see how the Nats react to having Adam Eaton gone for the rest of the year.
At some point the Mets will get Cespedes and Duda back and their starting pitchers will go six innings on a regular basis, instead of just once in their last eight games like they have now.
And perhaps Matz and Syndergaard will rejoin the team this year, too.
Charlie,
This was a very nice essay.
Thank you.
Dizzy is the right word.
I’m completely guilty of this. On the heels of a winning streak, I’m thinking WS or bust. Even last night’s game was a mixed bag. Despite all those runs we scored, we got a bad start from deGrom, the one guy I thought we could rely on, we made several base running blunders and in general, were too passive on the bases. Not sure if this was Sherlock or from the dugout or on the players, but there were several instances when I felt they should have been more aggressive on the base paths.
I realize that this is not the place for this remark, but this qualifying statement demonstrates why my request is both salient and necessary. Often an interesting question occurs to me which I’d like to bounce off you thoughtful participants, but given the nature of this forum, there doesn’t appear to be a dedicated location for the posting of such questions. Note that this is not a request to become a writer and/or editor of this here blog since, although I can pose a handful of interesting questions on a yearly basis, I am not qualified to construct complete sentences on a regular basis. Thanks for your consideration.
RJM
Jose – you may email me at [email protected]
Slightly off topic, but:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-other-times-we-saw-this-ryan-zimmerman/
Thanks for the link, TexasGus. A factor the article doesn’t mention when examining the reasons for Zim’s success this year is that he is sandwiched between Harper and Murphy. But, I think that the Nats tried something like that last year and it wasn’t nearly as successful. Then, you have to consider that Zim is healthier than he has been in a long time. The one major deficit that I see, and it’s not on offense, is that watching him throw is still painful.
The best thing about the article was the comment by Easyenough, who said:
“Unlike many other hitters this year that seem to be experimenting with increased launch angle, it’s interesting to note that Zimmerman has had periods in the past where he was incredibly successful with this hitting approach but then was either unable, unaware, or unwilling to persist with that approach.
Given this history of increasing launch angle and then not doing it, and his repeated avowal this year that he doesn’t care about launch angle and isn’t and doesn’t want to do anything different in his hitting approach than in the past, I’m less confident about his continued success with line drives than I am in players that appear to have made a concerted effort to change their swing.”