A real Saturday night special

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Eyes red after weeping for joy, Nationals reliever Aaron Barrett tips his cap from the dugout Saturday night.

Even down the stretch of the stretch, some things transcend ratings and standings. Aaron Barrett became one of them Saturday night.

When the Nationals righthander was sent out to pitch the bottom of the fifth, it may have been enough that he could be up for the assignment at all, never mind working a scoreless inning in a game that eventually became a ninth-straight Braves win.

And it wasn’t low leverage, either, despite the end of the Braves’s batting order looming. This wasn’t a mop-up assignment on either end of a ferocious blowout or to hold fort in a lost cause. Barrett relieved Nats starter Austin Voth with the Nats down a mere 2-1 and Ronald Acuna, Jr. looming as the third man scheduled to hit.

Maybe Barrett’s kind of comeback was the kind that moves a manager to trust his heart equal to trusting his stuff. It isn’t every major league pitcher who survives Tommy John surgery and a followup broken humerus bone to throw even one pitch, never mind a scoreless inning.

Barrett didn’t exactly start the gig the right way, walking Adeiny Hechevarria on four straight to open the inning. But he made sure Hechevarria was the only Braves runner of the frame. He got Braves starting pitcher Julio Teheran to foul out to first on 1-2. And then came Acuna, who was perfectly capable of spreading the Braves’ lead and the Nats’ concurrent miseries with a single swing.

The husky righthander with the doll-like face under his beard went right back to work. He caught Acuna looking at a strike one two-seam fastball on the upper inside corner. He got Acuna to swing right over a second two-seam fastball that hit the floor of the strike zone. He caught Acuna looking at a sweetly diving slider that landed smack dab on the low outside corner.

It was Barrett’s first major league punchout in 1,499 days, but the way he did it would leave a neurosurgeon envious of that kind of precision.

And when he got Ozzie Albies—who homered in the first—to loft a changeup to moderately short center field for the side, Barrett wiped tears from his eyes with the front of his Nats jersey as he stepped down from the mound toward the dugout. Where manager Dave Martinez and his grinning teammates high-fived and embraced him. Then Barrett took a seat, clutching the towel Martinez handed him, and wept unashamedly into that towel.

A three-run Atlanta sixth, including back-to-back homers by Brian McCann and Matt Joyce, still lurked ahead. So did a Nationals run scoring on a seventh-inning double play, and so did Juan Soto sending a two-run double to the back of center field in the eighth.

So, unfortunately, did the Nats falling ten games behind the Braves in the National League East with the 5-4 loss, while keeping a two-game grip on the league’s first wild card, while the Braves added to a 20-4 string since 11 August and a thirteenth straight home win, the Show’s most since the Indians did it in their pennant-winning 2016.

None of which really overthrew Barrett’s first major league inning in four years. “After the outing was over,” he managed to say after the game, “I’m just walking off and all the emotions just hit me. Just, ‘You did it, man. You did it’.”

He’d been one solid element of the 2014 Nats bullpen with a 2.66 ERA, a 2.59 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP), a 10.8 strikeouts-per-nine rate, and 49 punchouts in 40 2/3 innings. But he had a rough seventh-inning appearance in Game Four of that year’s division series sweep at the Giants’ hands, walking the bases loaded, then wild-pitching tying run Joe Panik home with Pablo Sandoval at the plate.

He pitched in terrible luck in 2015: a 2.21 FIP against a 4.60 ERA in forty appearances before going down to Tommy John surgery. Then, in his first return, his humerus bone snapped hard enough that those who were there could hear it resemble a gunshot, according to MLB.com’s Nats beat writer Jamal Collier. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post described it as “look[ing] like his elbow had ‘exploded’.”

Barrett subsequently began the long trek back up from the lowest minor leagues until his 2.75 ERA and 62 strikeouts in 52 1/3 innings at Harrisburg (AA) this year earned him the callup to the Nats. His wife, parents, in-laws, brothers, and physical therapist were at SunTrust Park Saturday. (Barrett lives just outside Atlanta itself.)

They plus thousands of Nats fans hope this is a comeback that sticks, that Barrett even at 31 continues his pitching career at all, never mind in the Show. They surely know others haven’t been that fortunate. Including one whose pitching arm humerus bone betrayed him likewise in 1988.

Dave Dravecky survived cancer in that bone to make a gutsy return to the Giants the following season, beating the Reds with an eight-inning performance. His very next start, against the Expos: the humerus broke while he delivered a pitch to Hall of Famer Tim Raines, sending Dravecky down in a tumbling heap. Season over.

During the subsequent on-field celebration when the Giants beat the Cubs in the 1989 National League Championship Series: arm broken again. X-rays showed the cancer came back as profoundly as Dravecky himself. Career over. Two years later: arm and shoulder amputated. He found a second career as a Christian motivational speaker and writer, often collaborating with his wife, Jan.

Things like that remind you to live in the moment and make it count for as long as you have the moment. Aaron Barrett plans to do just that. Even if he might have a Comeback Player of the Year award in his 2020 to come. With his spirit, don’t rule it out. “You dream about the moment,” Barrett told Collier. “You picture the moment, you try to visualize what it’s going to be like, and you know whatever moment or whatever happens, it’s unlike anything you envisioned.”

He may or may not have envisioned catching Ronald Acuna, Jr. with his pants down for strike three. But doing it only sweetened the rare soils from which Barrett hopes to continue emerging to stay.

Discouraged even when the Mets win?

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Amed Rosario and Joe Panik (2) celebrate the Mets’ Wednesday win over the Nats. So why does it still feel discouraging?

Four months ago, Dave Martinez couldn’t live five minutes without yet another pundit or sports talking head measuring him for the electric chair. Four minutes after the Mets blew one to the Nats in the bottom of the ninth that they led by six in the top, on Tuesday night, Martinez can live like a skipper who has about a 99 percent chance of seeing the postseason even by way of the National League’s first wild card.

Even if he and his Nats lose the afternoon after.

And a few moments before the Nationals started their off-the-charts Tuesday overthrow, Martinez had only one message for his players: “If you let this game go like this, it’s not going to be good,” as he put it in his post-game press conference. Kurt Suzuki in the bottom of the ninth finished making damn sure the game didn’t go like that. He also made sure that what was left of the Nationals Park crowd went from chaos to bedlam while he was at it.

After Suzuki’s three-run homer landed halfway up the left field seats Tuesday night, the Mets looked like they wouldn’t live another five minutes without someone, anyone, preparing to stage an intervention on behalf of the Crisis Addiction Anonymous organisation for which this year’s Mets ought to be the founding fathers.

“It kind of just seemed like a bad dream,” said Mets outfielder Brandon Nimmo, who accounted for two of the Mets’ ten Tuesday runs with a fourth-inning sacrifice fly and a ninth-inning homer. “I don’t know. That’s hard to do even in a Little League game I feel like, come back from [six] runs down in the bottom of the ninth against guys throwing 99 mph. I don’t really have words for it.”

Mets fans thought it was bad enough watching the Mets blow a seven-run lead in what looked like a blowout in the making against the Braves in Atlanta while almost letting the Braves win it at the eleventh hour? That was just a hard day’s night of a 10-8 win. Tuesday night’s 11-10 loss after the Mets had the damn game locked in the vault was they should have known better. And didn’t.

“We had a six-run lead,” lamented Mets manager Mickey Callaway, whose own neck looked as though it were being measured for a guillotine in May. “Major league pitchers got to be able to hold that.”

How could Martinez and his Dancing Nats, the guys who’ve been baseball’s best since 23 May and think nothing of turning the dugout and the clubhouse into Soul Train after epic home runs or hard-earned wins, know that their still-testy, still-implosive bullpen was going to be taken off the Tuesday night hook by a Mets bullpen that would have fought the Chicago Fire with incendiaries instead of water and other retardants?

A Wednesday matinee between the two, their final meeting of the regular season, promised to be an anticlimax if the Nats won. Or, if the Mets’ self-immolating bullpen incinerated themselves and the Mets yet again. Well, some promises are made to be broken, after all. Some.

Come Wednesday, Luis Avilan struck out Juan Soto swinging after Jeurys Familia surrendered an RBI single (to ex-Met Asdrubal Cabrera) and a two-run double (to Anthony Rendon); Seth Lugo—who wasn’t allowed to work a second inning Tuesday night, with results that will still live in Mets infamy—got his usual two-inning gig and shook off a pair of hits with no runs; and, Justin Wilson pitched a spotless bottom of the ninth.

And the Mets held on to win 8-4. Which cynics, meaning practically any Met fan on the planet, might suggest means it just isn’t safe anymore to trust these Mets with any lead more than four runs. They even had another six-run lead in the middle of the sixth—and let the Nats get a little frisky in the bottom of the inning.

They tied the Nats at a run in the top of the third when spaghetti-bat outfielder Juan Lagares, of all people, led off and hit Nats starter Anibal Sanchez’s hanging cutter over the center field fence. They doubled their pleasure in the top of the fourth when aging second baseman Robinson Cano, returning fresh from the injured list, blasted a first-pitch splitter the other way, into the Mets’ bullpen in left center, with right fielder Michael Conforto (leadoff double) aboard.

And they kicked the train into overdrive when Pete Alonso sent his National League-leading 45th bomb inside the left field foul pole with one out in the top of the fifth.

But with Mets starter Zack Wheeler labouring through five innings and 101 pitches despite surrendering nothing more than Nats shortstop Trea Turner’s two-out RBI single in the bottom of the second, Callaway decided he had no choice but to open the bullpen, and Familia came forth to open the Washington sixth.

Once the Mets’ effective closer, Familia hasn’t been the same since the Mets’ defense blew three World Series saves for him in 2015, or since Conor Gillaspie homered off him to help the Mets lose the 2016 wild card game, not to mention a domestic violence suspension and a blood clot putting paid to his 2017 before the Mets traded him away during 2018.

This season Familia’s been somewhere between lost and implosive, though he had a recent stretch of serviceability before he turned a two-all tie into an eventual 5-2 loss to the Phillies with a little help from a walk to Rhys Hoskins and, in due course, a three-run double by Scott Kingery on Sunday.

Now he took the mound in Nationals Park, walked Gerardo Parra and pinch hitter Andrew Stevenson back-to-back, and struck Turner out swinging. But he threw Cabrera—still bent on making the Mets pay for failing to re-sign him last winter—a creamy pitch that got turned into an RBI single. And he threw Rendon more fodder for the Nats third baseman to solidify a Most Valuable Player case in a walk year, Rendon driving one to the back of right center for a two-run double.

After Avilan dispatched Soto for the side, it took until the top of the eighth for the Mets to thicken the cushion, when Jeff McNeil squirted an RBI single through the right side for the seventh Mets run. The Mets made a push against returning Nats reliever Sean Doolittle in the top of the ninth but Doolittle managed to strand first and third with no scoring damage.

Then Wilson got a ground out, a line out, and shook off a walk to Suzuki—after spinning him around and into the dirt on the first pitch, perhaps just a little reminder against getting too comfy following Tuesday night’s discomfort—to end the game by getting Victor Robles to force Suzuki at second.

You’re encouraged to see a team recover that swiftly from a disaster like Tuesday night. Whether or not it means said team has one more run of derring-do in them before the regular season’s over. But maybe the Mets picked up a piece of Tuesday night news out of Pennsylvania that helped remind them it could always be worse.

Because as bad as it was for the Mets Tuesday night, it was absolutely worse for their Syracuse Mets AAA affiliate. The Mets blew a six-run lead in the ninth? The S-Mets blew a seven-run lead in the eighth, with the International League’s North Division title at stake in a tiebreaking game. But the S-Mets bullpen let the Scranton-Wilkes Barre RailRiders overthrow them, 14-13.

The Mets have been playing for a mere second National League wild card that looks more and more distant the deeper the stretch drive runs. Playing with dynamite, or matches at least, isn’t the way to reach it.

By and large the big boys have reminded the Mets how invincible they aren’t when they look like champions in the making but do it mostly at the expense of the bottom crawlers. Taking two of three from the first NL wild card-leading Nats, just like sweeping the American League second wild card-tied Indians last month, may yet prove aberrational.

Hi! We’re the Mets! And we’re crisis junkies. So who’s going to be the first Met to stand up, make the confession, and begin the recovery process?

The Mets have now won twelve of their last sixteen series, and have won the season series against the Nats, 12-7, but they don’t make you feel too encouraged anymore when they win. And the Nats don’t make you feel discouraged even when they lose two of three. (Even when you think they might think about joining CAA themselves.) Not until they open against the Braves Friday night, anyway.

The Mets hang themselves on the Nats’ gallows

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Trea Turner (7) gives Kurt Suzuki the Gatorade shower. The Nats bullpen should pay for his filet mignon dinners for a year after he helped the Mets bullpen stop the Nats’ intended self-hanging Tuesday night.

These Mets can hang with the big boys. We just forgot to remind ourselves it means hanging themselves. Adolf Eichmann himself didn’t hang from a gallows as big as the one the Mets’ bullpen built in Nationals Park Tuesday.

It takes a rare enough talent to blow a game your team has in the bank. But it takes genius to blow one your team secured in Fort Knox. Just when you thought the Mets’ pen began swearing off arson, and even meaning it, they remind you why you shouldn’t trust them with even a tea light.

Actually, let’s get the facts right. The Nats’ bullpen built the gallows for themselves in the top of the ninth. And they were in not necessarily dire shape but not necessarily pronounced revived fully, especially with overworked closer Sean Doolittle on the injured list.

Then the Mets’ bullpen yanked the Nats’ hapless bulls away from the rope and said, “Thanks large for saving us the trouble! Let us help you to the largest ninth-inning comeback in your franchise history. Least we can do for you building such a nice gallows for us!”

And when Kurt Suzuki, the Nats’ catcher, hit the game-ending three-run homer after Paul Sewald, Luis Avilan, and Edwin Diaz couldn’t get more than one out all inning long, it yanked the noose so tight the Mets looked decapitated as well as hanged.

(The last team to yield five runs or more in the top of the ninth and score more runs than that in the bottom of the ninth? The Red Sox, in June 1961. Against a different Washington franchise. What a difference over half a century makes.)

It didn’t matter that the Mets thumped Nats ace Max Scherzer for four runs in the fourth, beginning with ex-Nat Wilson Ramos extending his hitting streak to 26 games with an RBI double. Any more than it mattered that the Nats pried runs out of Jacob deGrom in the first, the sixth, and the eighth.

But it suddenly mattered even less that Pete Alonso made the score 10-4 in the top of the ninth when he finished a four-run inning with a two-run homer. And, less than that that two Nats relievers—Roenis Elias and Daniel Hudson—got strafed for the four runs before Juan Guerra finally ended that destruction by getting Michael Conforto to fly out for the side.

Because what really matters is three Mets relievers in the bottom of the ninth—Paul Sewald, Luis Avilan, and Edwin Diaz—making a chump out of their manager Mickey Callaway, who’s looked like a chump a little too often this year.

Callaway thought Seth Lugo working a perfect eighth before the five-run Met ninth meant it was perfectly safe for a change not to extend him for a second inning to protect a six-run lead. It was like telling a Brinks guard it was perfectly safe to let Bonnie and Clyde into the bank vault to double check their safe deposit box.

With Victor Robles leading off beating out an infield hit, Sewald got Howie Kendrick to fly out for the first and only Nats out of the inning. Because Trea Turner hit a 1-2 meatball to the back of right field for a double. And after Asdrubal Cabrera singled up the pipe for first and third, Anthony Rendon, the Nats’ should-be MVP front runner, singled home Turner.

Callaway then reached for Luis Avilan to pitch to Juan Soto, whose RBI double in the first opened the game’s scoring in the first place and whose two-run homer in the eighth pulled the Nats back to within a single run just before the Mets started their ninth-inning runaway-that-wasn’t. Soto singled to right to load the pads for Ryan Zimmerman pinch hitting for Matt Adams.

Out went Avilan and in came Edwin Diaz, who only looked in his last couple of outings as though he’d ransomed his once-deadly slider out of its kidnappers’ clutches. In his previous seven outings, he’d surrendered only two earned runs in five and two-thirds total innings. Maybe not close to the Diaz who was lights out in 2018 but not exactly the one who’d dissipated most of this season, either.

The problem was, only the first two of those gigs could be called high-leverage gigs. Diaz hadn’t seen anything like that in over two weeks until Tuesday night. And it showed when Zimmerman hit the second pitch of the plate appearance to deep right to send home Cabrera. But Diaz gamely wrestled Suzuki for seven pitches, a 3-1 count after opening with a swinging strike, then a pair of fouls.

The eighth pitch caught so much of the plate Suzuki could have been tried by jury for neglect if he didn’t send it over the left field fence.

Just like that, the Nats’ worries after losing to the Mets on Labour Day—especially filling their number-five starting rotaton spot after the Mets abused Joe Ross for two and a third, on a day Noah Syndergaard might as well have been the Invisible Man so far as the Nats were concerned—were over. For another day, at least.

With one swing Suzuki silenced the traveling 7 Line Army—a gang of Mets fans whose doings include making numerous road trips including to Washington this week, and who often sounded louder than Nats fans on Monday. In one half inning the poor 7 Liners got silenced almost as fast and hard as they’d been hot and loud in the top.

And Suzuki also punctuated a cold reality about these Mets. That magnificent post-All Star run not only ended ignominiously when they finally got to take on the bigger boys, it now looks like a cruel tease of a dream.

Their apparent crisis addiction remains their number one enemy. You thought the Mets were suddenly beginning to be exposed when they blew a set in Atlanta that they could have won, and won the third game of that set despite opening what looked like a blowout and managing to survive the Braves cutting the margin to a pair?

Who says a team that can blow a seven-run lead they’d built by the fourth inning against the Braves can’t blow a six-run lead they’d built in the top of the ninth against the Nats? Who were only too happy to dance over the Mets’ Tuesday night corpses? The backside of that, of course, is who says a team of Dancing Nats can’t pick themselves up from a six-run deficit at the eleventh hour?

And don’t discount the revenge factor when you think about that. It now seems like centuries ago, but the Mets overthrew the Nats in the bottom of the ninth to open a two-of-three Mets series win in New York last month. They did it almost the reverse of what the Nats did Tuesday night, with a three-run homer to tie and an RBI single to win. But it still left the Nats feeling deflated.

The Mets have been deflating themselves lately. After sweeping the Indians in New York they dropped back-to-back sweeps to the Braves and the Cubs, also in New York, before taking three of four from the Phillies before coming to Washington. That’s now a 3-8 record since 23 August.

Tuesday night may or may not demoralise the Mets completely. But it turned their hopes for even a second wild card into unreality. It probably, really was a sweet dream that they could have played and thought like contenders even for that card for as long as they did.

The Nats reminded the Mets in the worst way possible what happens when a contender real or alleged decide the other guys have no business hanging themselves while the Mets happen to be in the house.

But the Nats better be careful themselves. They have better teams to face yet. And those teams won’t be so inclined to stop them if the Nats insist on building and hanging on their own gallows.

Limits to crisis addiction

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

This time, Sean Doolittle wasn’t at the mercy of his 2019 nemeses, the Mets.

Seek the clinical definition of “crisis junkie,” and you shouldn’t be surprised to find that the definition includes, “New York Mets.” As white hot as they’ve been since the All-Star break, the Mets have not been in complete recovery from crisis addiction.

Every crisis junkie believes it’ll take just one turn of luck, the cards, or both to escape his or her latest crisis. On Sunday afternoon, down three going to the bottom of the ninth, the Mets had more than enough reason to believe theirs was coming in from the Nats bullpen. Sean Doolittle.

Doolittle—whom they’d battered for four runs to win at the last minute Friday night and bullied otherwise all season long. With the top of the order due up for the Mets and the Citi Field crowd giving Doolittle a standing ovation as he arrived on the mound.

Doolittle—who got Jeff McNeil to line out hard to right, struck out Amed Rosario swinging, and got Michael Conforto to ground out into a right-side shift. Crowning a scoreless two-and-a-thirds relief job by Doolittle plus Daniel Hudson and Wander Suero before him.

If it was a monkey off Doolittle’s back after his season-long futility against the Mets, the Nats could still be forgiven if they felt that even this 7-4 win, snapping the Mets’ eight-game winning streak, didn’t necessarily feel like a win.

Even if the Mets spotted the Nats three unearned runs in the top of the first, on a throwing error to first and a dropped ball at the plate that would have kept Juan Soto from scoring that third run: Mets catcher Wilson Ramos had him cold by several feet before the ball fell from his mitt.

Because the Mets broke their weekend habit of fourth-inning ties by tying it at three in the bottom of the second—on a pair of one-out singles, a two-out RBI single, a sneak-attack, bases-loading, two-out bunt by Mets starting pitcher Jacob deGrom, and a two-run double. By then the Nats must asked, if they hadn’t the previous two nights, “What the hell do we have to do to put these pests away?”

They may not be the only team in the league tempted to keep cases of Raid in the dugout or pest control crews on call when they face the Mets.

For their part, the Mets may not quite be ready to send themselves to a twelve-step program for crisis addiction. Because if that’s what’s keeping them white hot and helping them prove they can hang with the big boys—even those addled otherwise by the injured list and by self-immolating bullpens, just as the Mets were earlier in the season—they’ll work with it.

The twelve steps could wait until the season was over or the Mets fell out back out of the races. Whichever came first. Couldn’t they?

“It’s magic!” crows a Met fan of my acquaintance. He’s probably echoed by a few million Met fans who prefer seeking extraterrestrial causes for both the heights of success and the depths of failure. You’d think they couldn’t bear to admit that playing heads-up baseball when the Mets needed to play it the most had anything to do with their post-All Star break success.

Let the Nats pull back ahead 5-3 in the seventh on a two-out, two-run double by Asdrubal Cabrera that followed a little shakiness out of the Mets’ bullpen? The Mets weren’t going to let that stand without an answer if they could help it. Conforto’s seventh-inning sacrifice fly off Nats reliever Hunter Strickland said as much.

But for a brief moment it looked as though the Nats were going to pay the price for their manager’s unconscionable brain freeze right after that. How could Dave Martinez not have challenged Pete Alonso being ruled hit by a pitch when the pitch hit the batter, not the ball, with every television replay available showing as much?

A called strikeout later, ex-Nat Wilson Ramos drilled a frozen rope right into Gerardo Parra’s glove in left to strand two Met runners and make Martinez look like a genius for a few moments. Better not to let Alonso have another swing with two aboard. Except J.D. Davis loomed and could crunch one. Strickland nailed Davis with a called strikeout before the Ramos line out. That’s called dodging the atomic bomb.

Unfortunately for the Mets, the net result is also called wasting yet another stellar deGrom start. He shook off the three unearned in the first to all but have his way with the Nats, but that first inning drained him enough that he wasn’t likely to pitch more than five innings. All odds favoured even the Mets’ shaky bullpen against the Nats’ shakier pen.

Until Jeurys Familia—once the Mets’ closer, this year a prodigal son having a horror of a season—found his old self at just the right hour to strike out the side in the top of the eighth. And Wander Suero sandwiched a grounder back to the box between two strikeouts in the bottom of the eighth.

Then Doolittle was up and throwing in the Nats bullpen and the Mets could just taste the gift coming. In a way, that was part of their problem Sunday. They looked as though they were trying to hit six-run homers in about half their plate appearances. They looked as if they wanted to get to the win without navigating the traffic on the way all day long.

Didn’t quite work out that way. Now, before they got another crack at Doolittle they had to get past the Nats in the top of the ninth. And they trusted Edwin Diaz, command struggles and all and with almost a full week’s rest in the bargain, to perform that assignment. With the dangerous top of the Nats order to greet him.

Diaz shook off a one-out walk to Adam Eaton and didn’t let Eaton stealing second stop him from catching Anthony Rendon, having a four-hit day to that point, looking at strike three. But up stepped Victor Robles, a late-game insertion to center field, after Parra was moved to left following Juan Soto’s ankle turn on a seventh-inning baserunning out, after ex-Met Asdrubal Cabrera doubled home a pair to break the three-all tie in the first place.

On 2-1 Diaz hung a slider to Robles. And Robles hung it over the left field fence. And after Matt Adams grounded out to second for the side, Diaz walked into the dugout looking as though he’d been told his favourite pet was kidnapped and left for dead. Pitching coach Phil Regan spoke gently to him and hugged him, like a father comforting a heartbroken son.

And this time Doolittle stood up well enough to his season-long bullies.

Yet considering their Friday and Saturday night surrealistics, Sunday afternoon’s loss probably didn’t feel like a loss to the whole of the Mets, either.

With apologies to Vin Scully, in a second half that has been so improbable, the impossible happened. Friday night the Nats put a boot on the Mets’ throat in the top of the ninth, and the Mets yanked it away in the bottom of the ninth. Also known as the last minute. On Saturday night, the Mets had to settle for the Nats putting the edge of a shoe against their neck and bumping it to one side in the eighth. Also known as the next-to-last minute.

Friday night the Mets overthrew two three-run deficits and Strasburg becoming the Nats’ all-time franchise strikeout leader to win. Saturday night they overthrew a two-run deficit in the fourth and a one-run deficit in the eighth to win. They’d tied against Strasburg and Patrick Corbin alike. When it came time for the running of the bullpens, the Mets ended up looking a little less like bull.

And on both nights Citi Field rocked and rolled as if this was a postseason series. It didn’t escape the Nats’ eyes and ears, either. Strasburg’s in particular.

“They pull for their team,” the righthander said, calmly but firmly, after Friday night’s shock. “And I don’t know if they come play us again, but I hope all the fans are watching the game cause it gets into crunch time and those things really carry teams and get us to the next level.”

Actually, the Mets are scheduled for one more trip to Washington, down the stretch, a 2-4 September set to end the season series between the two teams. If this weekend doesn’t make or break either the Mets’ or the Nats’ seasons, by the time that Monday-Wednesday meeting comes to pass either team could be looking closer at a wild card slot or an early winter vacation.

Theoretically, both teams could also be nipping at the heels of the National League East-leading Braves by then, too. If not sooner. The Braves are a .500 team for August so far, and after winning four straight after the All-Star break they’re 12-13 since. They’re no longer a necessarily impossible target.

But the Mets since the All-Star break restored reasons for the throngs to rock their ballpark. The Nats had a 5-6 homestand before their current road trip, but if Strasburg was calling out Nats Nation to give the team a little more in the way of the Mets’ current kind of crowd incentive, since they’re not quite dead and in the coffin just yet, Nats Nation would be wise to heed.

Even taking two of three from the Nats stands the Mets well with a trip to Atlanta looming. A Mets win Sunday would probably have made them feel invincible no matter where they traveled afterward. Ending the day at 21-7 since the All-Star break still leaves them baseball’s hottest team since that break.

A Nats loss Sunday—compounded by Max Scherzer’s continuing absence, the continuing rehabs of both Ryan Zimmerman and Howie Kendrick, and the likelihood that pending free agent Rendon may be playing his last weeks in Nats fatigues—might have made them feel as though the string to be played out was closer to resembling the clothesline from which they’d hang to dry.

The Nats have a slightly more balanced schedule the rest of the season. Starting with a weekday set against the Reds at home, they get to mix sets against the flotsam and jetsam with sets against the big boys. The Mets should be so lucky. Theirs isn’t that well balanced a schedule the rest of the season. They might have felt charmed Friday and Saturday, but Sunday should have re-grounded them enough.

Enough to remind them that crisis addiction isn’t always the way to stay in a wild card race after you’ve returned from the living dead to get back into one. Especially with bigger enough fish than the Nats swimming into the waters in which they’re about to bathe the rest of the season.

Walk through the door of your friendly neighbourhood Crisis Anonymous. Say it loud and humble. “Hi, we’re the Mets. And we’re crisis junkies.” Step one. Take it ASAP.

The Mets simplify the hard way

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Luis Guillorme defied his unimpressive rookie slash line to help stun the Nats Saturday night . . .

In ancient times Casey Stengel would see ancient Satchel Paige warming up in the enemy bullpen and exhort his Yankees, “Get your runs now—Father Time is coming.” This weekend, the Nationals’ mantra could be, “Get your runs A.S.A.P. Father Time’s predictable compared to these Mets.”

But the Nats don’t really want to know from Father Time, who may be coming sooner than they’d care to know.

Not when they followed a last-minute 7-6 loss Friday night with a 4-3 loss in the next-to-last minute Saturday night. It wasn’t quite the cardiac arrest Friday night was, but it was still enough to tempt them to think of keeping crash carts on call.

Perhaps deploying one out of their bullpen. And another to their manager’s office.

Dave Martinez just didn’t have the heart, or whatever else needed, to send Hunter Strickland—his new bullpen toy, but not even a topic Friday night—out for the eighth inning after Strickland manhandled the Mets in the seventh. But Strickland is two weeks removed from returning from a lat strain that kept him down four months, and Martinez didn’t want to overtax him. Even though he looked smooth enough Saturday night.

This time, his assigned closer Sean Doolittle wasn’t even a topic. Not after the Mets bastinadoed him for four runs in the ninth to win from three runs down Friday night. This Saturday night topic was now Fernando Rodney, the elder, whose previous comparative success against the Mets was two seasons behind and barely visible in the rear view mirror.

But there was Rodney and his trademark, CC Sabathia-like lopsided hat to start the New York eighth. And leading off was a Met rookie, Luis Guillorme, who brought all of a .156/.182/.188 slash line to the plate batting for center fielder Juan Lagares. It should have been meat for Rodney. Instead, he was dead meat.

On a full count, during the making of which Guillorme didn’t even wave his bat, and Rodney didn’t even hint toward throwing the changeup that was once his money pitch and was still reasonably effective, Rodney served Guillorme a meatball. And Guillorme provided the sauce. He sent his first major league home run clean over the right field fence to tie things at three.

Then late-game Mets second base insertion Joe Panik grounded one to short. Sure-handed, sure-footed Nats shortstop Trea Turner had it just as surely. But first baseman Matt Adams mishandled his uncharacteristic low throw, leaving Panik safe to move to second on a followup single lined up the pipe by Jeff McNeil for his first hit of the weekend.

Out came Rodney. In came Daniel Hudson, who’d worked a near-effortless eighth on Friday night. And, after Amed Rosario’s hard grounder pushed the runners to second and third, Pete Alonso checked in at the plate.

The Nats optimist said, we’ll have none of that nonsense this time around. That nonsense, of course, being Alonso drilling Stephen Strasburg for a two-run blast in the fourth Friday night.

The Nats realist said, pick your poison, Davey. Because putting Alonso on to load the pads meant facing J.D. Davis—who’d followed Alonso’s Friday night flog with his own game-tying solo jack in that same fourth. And, who hit one of two consecutive solo bombs in the Saturday night fourth, birthday boy (and former Nat) Wilson Ramos hitting the second of them to tie this game at two.

So Martinez picked Davis. The good news: this time, Davis didn’t reach the seats. The bad news: His fly to right was long and deep enough to send Panik home with what proved the winning run.

And if Martinez couldn’t bear to send Strickland out for a second inning’s work in the bottom of the eighth, Mets manager Mickey Callaway wasn’t as nervous as you might think about sending Seth Lugo out for a second inning’s work in the top of the ninth.

Lugo may have had command issues in the top of the eighth, magnified when Juan Soto hit his second homer of the night, a mammoth drive into the second deck in right, to put the Nats back ahead 3-2. But Callaway gambled that that was just Lugo getting really warmed up. He also wasn’t entirely sure about trusting Edwin Diaz, who’d warmed up during the eighth.

So Lugo, named the National League’s relief pitcher of the month for July, went out for the ninth. Noisy Citi Field and edgy Nats Nation, wherever they were, said their prayers accordingly.

But former Met Asdrubal Cabrera lined out to right.

And Victor Robles looked at strike three on the outer edge, on a night plate umpire Tripp Gibson gave Nats and Mets pitchers alike a very generous outer strike zone.

Then Gerardo Parra—maybe the Nats’ best pinch hitter and bench representative, entering the game with a .319 career batting average against the Mets—batted for Nats catcher Yan Gomes.

And, after Parra fouled off a 3-1 service, Lugo caught him looking at strike three.

All of a sudden, Soto’s two-run homer off Mets starter Noah Syndergaard in the top of the first seemed a small memory to plague Mets fans. Just the way Davis and Ramos’s fourth-inning destruction (setting a new Mets team record for consecutive multiple homer games) seemed to Nats Nation after Soto teed off in the top of the eighth.

Once again, the Mets found a way, any way, past or around the Nats’ effective starting pitchers, in Saturday night’s case Patrick Corbin. Once again, the Mets got into a bullpen whose 10.10 ERA against them entering Saturday night meant giving them at least one definite victim against who they could fire whatever bullets happened to be handy.

And once again, the Nats couldn’t find a way to make anything stick, even on a night Syndergaard had to shake off an early explosion and some early inconsistency to keep them off the scoreboard further for the rest of his seven innings’ work. Not even on a night when Corbin was mostly his calmly effective self through six.

The Nats compelled the Mets to do things the hard way, late but their bullpen, retooling and all, showed it still had major kinks to un-kink. But the Mets didn’t exactly seem to object to doing things the hard way. It’s coming easier for them that way.

Now, it may not be a question of whether these still-somewhat-flawed Mets can hang with the big boys yet. But it may be a question as to whether these Nats will hang. With the big boys, or at the end of their own noose.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

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