These meatheads couldn’t get me even three runs a start even if I offered to pay for them to bribe the other teams into taking dives. Now they get me six, and I’m supposed to be trying to beat them? Just. So. Mets.—What Jacob deGrom could have been forgiven for thinking before he went to work against his old team on Friday night.

Having been a Met fan since the day they were born, I’ve seen enough cringe to last three lifetimes and two Hall of Fame careers. Enough so that I’ve earned the stripes required to tell today’s Met-fans-come-lately (say, strictly this century) that even the Mets deserve not to be written off entirely for a season over one bad inning . . . in April.

Friday night almost changed my mind.

When Jacob deGrom was the best Mets pitcher this century, winning two Cy Young Awards on merits that (among other things) should have shattered the myth of the pitcher “win,” he did it despite getting an average of 3.3 runs to work with per inning pitched in his starts. He could have taken the Mets to court and sued for non-support, and no judge would have remanded him to the nut farm.

“So are you still asking why we’re ignoring wins?” The Athletic‘s Jayson Stark asked, then answered. “[T]here isn’t a single entry on the state sheet that tells us less about how this man has pitched than the entry that most people used to check first. That’s why.”

“Jacob deGrom’s issue wasn’t that he ‘didn’t know how to win’.” It was that he didn’t know how to not be on the 2018 New York Mets,” wrote Anthony Castrovince, in A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics. That was deGrom’s issue in 2019, as well.

So. After more injury miseries and one change of address, deGrom finally showed up in Citi Field Friday night. The Mets thanked him for his distinguished previous service with a video presentation that had the righthander very appreciative. “It was really cool,” he said after the game. “Like I said before, this is where it all started. And then coming back here, I thought it was going to be a very special day. So thankful to the Mets for playing that. And you know, like I said, these fans were great to me when I was here. And you know, that was a really nice thing they did.”

What a difference three years makes. The Mets got deGrom six runs to work with before the first inning was over. There was just one little problem with that, before you start thinking about old times’ sake. They gave him the runs to work with before he even had to take the mound.

DeGrom pitches for the Rangers now. (More injury miseries kept him from pitching more than nine games for the Rangers between 2023-24.) It’s not that he would have objected to getting six runs for a cushion before he even had to go to his office, but you couldn’t blame the man if he allowed himself even one moment to think: These meatheads couldn’t get me even three runs even if I offered to pay for them to bribe the other teams into taking dives. Now they get me six, and I’m supposed to be trying to beat them? Just. So. Mets.

Of course, deGrom could have laughed like Figaro that he might not have wept. The Rangers hit the plate against young Mets starter Jonah Tong, a pitcher with promise getting perhaps a too-early education in shaking it off and starting over. That’s after his first major league start found him sitting prettily enough with twelve runs to work with after two innings. (Against the Mighty Marlins, 29 August, en route the Mets’ 19-9 Fish fry.)

Now, in his third major league start, Tong started by walking Josh Smith, striking Wyatt Langford out, walking Joc Pederson, and getting Jake (Whata) Burger to fly out to center field, pushing Smith to third. Two out, two on. And then . . . and then . . .

And then along came Jung. Josh Jung, lining a single to right to send Smith home and Pederson to third. Then came Alejandro Osuna to poke a first-pitch single into shallow enough left to sent Pederson home. Then came a walk to Jonah Heim to load the pads for Cody Freeman to shoot a 2-2 fastball into right for a two-run single. Then came a full-count fastball for Michael Helman to line down the left field line for a two-run double. And then came Huascar Brazoban to lure Smith into flying out for the side.

The Mets did manage to pry three runs out of their old buddy in the bottom of the third, when Francisco Alvarez greeted him with a home run to open, then a single and a double turned to Juan Soto and Pete Alonso going back-to-back with sacrifice flies. The Rangers made it 8-3 to stay when Dylan Moore yanked a two-run homer off Mets reliever Gregory Soto in the top of the seventh, before deGrom’s evening ended.

DeGrom sports a neat 2.82 ERA and a staggering 0.92 walks/hits per inning pitched rate this season. Neat enough for a guy who turned 37 while we blinked in his absence. A guy who enjoyed getting another chance to pitch in front of Mets fans once again. “[T]he fans were great to me tonight,” he said of the ovation he got pregame and after his evening looked over. [He pitched seven strong.] They were great to me when I was here. So I always enjoyed taking them out in front of this crowd. So tonight was just as special.”

But getting six runs to work with from the Mets right off before pitching against them, deGrom must have felt unable to decide whether to call for a glass of champagne or the Looney Limousine.