Oh, the Mets changed the conversation, all right.
They changed it right back to the dark place it has occupied in baseball’s universe since Citi Field’s debut season.
A winter of intriguing transactions, a spring of promising young pitchers and 8 ²/₃ innings’ worth of encouraging baseball went up in flames Monday, at least temporarily. The Opening Day Flushing in Flushing left the Mets dazed and confused, as repeated bullpen meltdowns led to a 10-inning, 9-7 loss to the superior Nationals.
“Not a good day, obviously,” said David Wright, captain and master of understatement. “Started out great.”
It started with general manager Sandy Alderson, commencing his fourth year on the job and the first in which he received permission to spend some real money, meeting with reporters and standing forcefully behind his “challenge” for the Mets — who have idled between 70 and 79 wins the prior five seasons — to reach the 90-win mark in 2014.
“It’s important for us to change the conversation,” Alderson said.
It sure is. Alderson’s bosses, the Wilpons and Saul Katz, face a trust deficit with their customer base that is as vast as any such owner-fan dynamic in all of Major League Baseball. During the pregame introductions, Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada got hit the hardest, although the subtext pointed less toward “Boo!” and more toward, “Drew!” in honor of the free-agent shortstop Stephen Drew on whom the Mets haven’t bitten.
When Chris Young suffered a right quad strain and Daniel Murphy’s wife went into labor, and those developments pushed both Andrew Brown and Juan Lagares into the lineup — with Eric Young Jr. shifting from the outfield to second base — and then both Brown and Lagares delivered key home runs to give the Mets leads of 3-0 and then 5-4? It felt like KisMet, like the baseball gods finally were keeping an eye on the game’s most downtrodden big-market team.
Ah, but a most familiar conversation among Mets fans of recent vintage — “Our bullpen stinks” — turned those potential back-page heroics into sidebars. Carlos Torres and Scott Rice each threw four pitches, all balls, to issue back-to-back walks in the seventh. Long Island native John Lannan, a newcomer, looked every bit like the guy who struggled to stay in the big leagues the last two years, as he blew the game open for good by giving up a three-run homer to Anthony Rendon in the 10th.
Most concerning, closer Bobby Parnell, returning from neck surgery, still looked far from full strength as he failed to convert his first save opportunity.
The fact newcomer Jose Valverde looked great picking up four outs in four batters, three of them strikeouts, and the reality that losing pitcher Jeurys Familia deserved a far better fate — he gave up only one well-struck ball, Ian Desmond’s sacrifice fly in the 10th — will have to wait for another time, if ever, to rise to the top of the conversation.
“We gave this one away today. We flat-out gave it away,” said Wright, as critical as he’ll be. “ … For us to accomplish what we want to accomplish, we’re not good enough to be giving games away today. We can’t give extra outs. We can’t make not so much of the physical mistakes, but mental mistakes today and expect to win. We need to play a lot more crisp, a lot more clean, than we did today.”
They need, very much, to avoid an April like last year’s (10-15) or 2011’s (11-16). They need to win more games, draw more fans, quiet the understandable anger that surges among the people who support them the most.
They sure could have used this Opening Day victory, especially with Tuesday’s scheduled off day giving folks another 24 hours to boil.
“You never like to lose Opening Day,” Terry Collins said, “but the last couple of years, we won Opening Day. This is one game of 162. We’ve got to remember that.”
It’s a charmingly freakish characteristic of the Mets’ existence that their Opening Day record dropped to 34-19 (.642), still the best in all of baseball. Yet they’ve exhausted their charm, their roller-coaster history, with their five-year run of ineptitude.
Their next chance to change the conversation comes Wednesday night at Citi against these Nationals. The longer it takes, the fewer who will even bother to listen.