I am not a person that is prone to panicking in bad situations. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s something. I’m the kind of person that would gather anything important and carefully consider all of my possible exits during a fire, instead of simply chucking a chair through my window and leaping out. So, it makes perfect sense that I never panic when it comes to my beloved sports teams. Whether it’s a 3-run deficit in the 9th inning or a 5-game deficit in September, I always carefully consider each possible scenario and usually save all my worries/panic/regrets for later. Much later.
Maybe this is because my expectations have become so low for our New York Metropolitans that I just expect the worst to happen year in and year out and day in and day out, and when it actually does, I’m not surprised or panicked, just saddened at another wasted opportunity.
Right now, I’m breaking all of my rules though. I’m panicking. Why is this? Could it be because I’m worried that our nice little May and June hot streak was just a fluke and a product of great pitching and timely hitting? Could it be because I went against one of the most important rules in the Mets Fan Bible and tricked myself into thinking we actually had a talented team that could possibly contend with the best of them? Or could it be because this is probably my favorite Mets team (chemistry and players-wise) since the 2000 season? It could be all of those things, but one thing I know for sure is that the New York Mets are in trouble right now. They are in quicksand up to their knees and sinking fast. All signs point to failure, whether it’s the fact that it took our offense 24 innings to score a single run after coming back from the All-Star Break or that the great Francisco Rodriguez (I refuse to call him K-Rod anymore) almost blew the same game twice as my fellow Mets writer Chris Higgins pointed out in his last column.
The panic could be coming from the collective belief of Mets fans that all would be right again once Carlos Beltran returned to the lineup (it’s certainly not) and that maybe Big Pelf would be back to his early season form once he had a nice rest during the break (he’s certainly not) and because pitchers like Barry Enright are baffling our lineup to the point where my dad sent me a text last night asking me when the Diamondbacks signed Sandy Koufax. The panic could be coming from any one of these things, or it could be coming from all of them at once. All I know is that I don’t usually panic (I thought the Giants winning the Super Bowl in 2008 could cure me from all of my sports-related anxiety for at least 5 years) and right now, I’m panicking.
So let’s talk about last night. As we all know, the Mets lost again, getting a “too little, too late” home run by Angel Pagan with nobody out in the 9th to give us all false hope of a possible rally and then shattering that hope a few minutes later. Although the second half of the season is only 6 games old right now and it’s hard to say that 6 games is long enough to establish anything as typical, last night was in fact a very typical Mets second-half game, if only for the fact that it was strikingly similar to almost every game we’ve played since the All-Star Break (with the exception of Monday night’s catastrophe).
For starters, we almost got a strange and probably well-deserved gift from the crew at SNY. Due to some “technical difficulties”, we weren’t able to even watch the first 2 and a half innings. When the live video feed was finally recovered, the Snakes were batting in the bottom of the 3rd and there was no score. Instead of recapping the game, I’ll let my tweets from last night and a few humorous exchanges with my dad tell the story for me.
The following tweets are in chronological order, starting from the 1st inning when the Mets loaded the bases and failed to score — again.
“SNY is experiencing technical difficulties right now. My dad: ‘The whole team is experiencing technical difficulties.’ He’s great.”
“Me: ‘They have the bases loaded, maybe they can score when no one is watching.’ Dad: ‘Pretty soon no one will be watching them anyway.’ haha”
“And with a television audience of zero, the Mets still fail to get a run across the plate with the bases loaded and only one out!”
“There’s a Francisco Rodriguez on the mound for the Angels right now…umm, can Omar Minaya tell them that they can have ours back?” (Note: I didn’t turn on the Yankee game, I would never do that…I was in a bar and it just happened to be on the TV next to me)
“It’s 2010…and right now I’m READING the Mets game. Literally. I’m reading the closed captioning on the TV at Friday’s. Thanks, SNY.”
“Bottom of the 3rd now in Arizona — still no live feed. I think it’s safe to say that someone at SNY is not going to have a job tomorrow.”
“And right as I hit the send button on that last tweet, the game finally comes on. Better late than never, right?”
“Actually, I take that back. I liked it better when we couldn’t see the game. Upton just homered to dead center, 1-0 DBacks.”
“Where do you think Jason Bay keeps all the money that he’s stealing from the Mets? Off-shore bank accounts? Maybe plastic garbage bags under his bed?”
“Dad’s response to that Jason Bay joke: ‘He sure as hell isn’t corking his bat with it (the money).’ He is on a roll tonight.”
“The Mets are being outscored in this series 16-2 right now. This is a last place Diamondbacks team. This is called a tailspin, yes?”
“Double Play Bay strikes again!”
“Bay at this point last year: 20 HR, 72 RBI. Now: 6 HR, 44 RBI, 8 remote controls thrown at TV screen, 89 expletives yelled in frustration.”
“FOR WHOM THE BELL THOLES! First homer of career for Josh Thole. Dare I say….rally? Haha I’m just kidding.” (Note: That is the first and most likely also the last Metallica reference I ever make in any column for the rest of my life.)
“By the way, all of these tweets are going into tomorrow’s Mets column. Of course I recycle my own jokes, why would I come up with new ones?”
And that was all she wrote. Or all I wrote. Either way, the Mets lost their 5th game out of 6 since the All-Star Break and the 8th game out of their last 10 overall. Luckily for us, the Phillies keep losing too, and somehow we are still barely nursing a .5 game lead over them. For the moment, we are still in second place in the NL East. For the moment, we are 6.5 games behind the surging Atlanta Braves who now own the best record in the NL. That all can change tonight. It can change for the better, or it can take another turn for the worst.
The truth is that no matter how terribly our Mets have looked recently, there are still 68 games left to be played and we aren’t out of anything yet. Believe it or not, we’re still somehow right in the thick of it, hanging on by a thread. Sure, we’ve seen our record balloon to 11 games over .500 and then fall back down to Earth just as quickly, but right now we are keeping our heads above water and trying not to panic. Let’s just hope that it’s not too late for that.
