The crowd is a bit thin, thinner than the number they’ll announce later, but the folks carry a buzz with them. Maybe some of them are here for the Nas concert that will follow the baseball game, but most of them are here because they have watched their baseball team closely these past few weeks, and they like what they see.
They like the fact that when the Mets’ season bottomed out a few weeks ago, when they sank 15 games under .500, when they easily could have dashed toward 25 games under .500, they did something else instead: They kept playing hard. They started getting some pitching.
They hit the All-Star break with a little momentum.
The people, they don’t ask for much, they really don’t. Not at this stage of the Mets’ history, not in this summer, not at this phase of the rebuilding plan. Give them a few beacons of hope. Give them a few morsels, a few crumbs. That’s why many of them are here. They’re excited about their baseball team. They’re jazzed. They’re fired up. They’re …
They’re looking up at the scoreboard in the top of the first inning.
Phillies 4, Mets 0.
OK. So everyone, even Jeremy Hefner, can have a bad inning, it’s only four runs, it isn’t as if Kyle Kendrick, the Phillies starter, has ever made anyone forget Robin Roberts, so …
So they look up at he scoreboard in the top of the third inning.
Phillies 11, Mets 0.
They rub their eyes. That has to be a typo. Only it isn’t a typo.
Phillies 11, Mets 0.
And so here we go again, watching the Mets’ relentless capacity to squander prosperity, to marginalize momentum, to take the feel-good portion of their calendar and dip it in an acid bath. The final would be 13-8 because Kendrick still doesn’t remind anyone of Robin Roberts and because the ’13 Phillies don’t remind anyone of the ’08 Phillies.
But the ’13 Mets sure do look like the ’12 Mets, and the ’11 Mets, and the ’10 Mets already, three straight Mets teams that played above expectations in the first half of seasons, went away for the All-Star break, and came back for the second half looking like they’d rather be playing shuffleboard.
“A lot of people thought we should lose 100 games last year,” Mets manager Terry Collins had said before the game. “A lot of people thought we were going to lose 100 this year, especially the way we started. So if, at the end of the year, you look up and we’re 81-81, and you’ve lost three-fifths of your rotation to injury, and your fourth-place guy has had a rough time of it …”
That was the thing, of course. The Mets had shown you just enough in the past month to think maybe this could be different. There were the kid pitchers. There was Hefner, who for weeks has been outpitching those kid pitchers. There was the past week, when you could really feel what Citi Field might look like, and feel like, given a ballclub with a fighting chance.
And then it was 4-0 after one.
And it was 11-0 after three.
“Tell you what,” Collins said later. “Down 11-0, make it a game. That’s pretty impressive for our guys.”
Here’s the thing, though: nobody has ever questioned whether Collins’ players will get after it for him, will get their uniforms dirty. For three years we’ve seen him make do with an awful lot of Quadruple-A players. A lot of hopeless nights, the Mets find a way to get the tying run to the plate.
But a wise man once said it best: No medals for trying.
And the fact is, Collins’ final grade this year is going to be determined, once and for all, by how his team plays, how often it wins, and not how gritty it is. The Mets pattern of second-half descent was troubling the last three years because it quashed three months of winning. But there’s no such base this time around. They stumble here, they don’t turn good into bad. They turn bad into worse.
And they don’t need that this time around.