At least the Mets seem to be accepting that some things aren’t working. They reported for duty in Philadelphia without Joey Wendle, mercifully DFA’ed in favor of Mark Vientos, and recalled Joey Lucchesi while sending Jose Butto down to presumably find coaches to help him tame his sudden bout of wildness. And, hey, the plan looked pretty good for an hour or so. Vientos cracked an early double off Ranger Suarez, who’s been invincible in 2024, and Lucchesi looked solid for four innings, his record blemished only by a Bryce Harper home run over the left field wall, which we should remember is abou ..read more

The Mets ain’t too bad when they wear either their classic home pinstriped uniforms (10-7) or their road grays (9-8). They’re godawful when they wear anything else. Four losses with no wins in the City Connects. Two losses with no wins in the fade-to-blacks. And now, with the belated arrival of the white pants that enabled them to don their blue jerseys, they’ve been unable to win in another shade. The Mets put on their blues Tuesday afternoon and immediately came down with a fresh case of them, falling to the Phillies, 4-0. Aaron Nola pitched a shutout. I wasn’t rooting for him to prevail, bu ..read more

The game wasn’t lost when Edwin Diaz gag-jobbed the save, though Diaz’s slider has been MIA all season, his command was horrific again, and some of us have been sounding the alarm for some time now. The game wasn’t lost when Whit Merrifield was inexplicably given a free base after clearly swinging through a 3-1 Diaz slider, even though this umpiring crew was an embarrassment and yet another flashing red indicator that balls, strikes and all the other decisions MLB umpires get serially wrong need to be taken away from them posthaste. (Though when this finally happens we’ll get another idiotic c ..read more

Dull and dreary turned to bright and shiny in an instant — the very last instant. If you’re gonna make such a switch, latest inevitably proves better than never. Had Brandon Nimmo not swung and connected for the walkoff two-run homer that transformed a 3-2 deficit into a 4-3 victory, dull and dreary was prepared to carry the night Sunday. Dull and dreary has been this Met season’s signature, even if the signature’s i’s have been dotted and t’s have been crossed at brief intervals with improbable swings like Nimmo’s. There were Pete Alonso and Tyrone Taylor pushing the Mets into the win column ..read more

There’s honestly not a lot of insight to be had comparing a mediocre baseball team with a very good one. Very good teams make plays and get hits when it matters; mediocre ones sometimes do and sometimes don’t. Christian Scott, forced to cosplay as a chimney sweep for his first-ever Citi Field start, was pretty good: He showed an electric fastball, was aggressive in tackling the Braves’ lineup, and most importantly he threw strikes. Honestly, he made one bad pitch all afternoon, a fastball to Orlando Arcia that got too much plate and so became a souvenir. But Max Fried was better, using his dev ..read more

Good call Friday night wearing the reimagined (apparently during a bout of gloom) black jerseys in which the Mets wordmark, the player name and the numbers on the front and back sink forlornly into the fabric as if they followed Carole King’s example of staying in bed all morning just to pass the time. The rain was an apt touch as well. The Mets started their game late, fell behind fairly early and feinted toward catching up late, only to fall to their ostensible archrivals from Atlanta. Competitively, the Braves play in a different league, but the last time we vied for anything of substance ..read more

After a weekend when the Mets sought out and discovered multiple ways to lose in St. Petersburg, it was a pleasant change of pace to watch them figure out how to win one in St. Louis. They sat Pete Alonso. Given the Polar Bear’s roughly 2-for-a-thousand slump, they kind of had to. They inserted DJ Stewart in Alonso’s stead, and though Stewart is not a first baseman, he played first base without incident and knocked in the night’s first run, in the first inning. They stuck Jeff McNeil in left field, one of the positions he used to fill with a flourish, and he made a trademark Flying Squirrel ca ..read more

I don’t know if therapy rays are actually a thing (they probably are), but I’ve been to Tropicana Field, which has the affect of the world’s largest basement rec room and smells vaguely like pool cleaner, and the most interesting part of the stadium is the oft-shown pool where cownose rays swim around in a circle. You can reach in and pet the rays, and while I doubt it’s a fulfilling experience for them — this classic Onion bit comes to mind — I found it mildly diverting. Not mildly diverting? Sunday’s Mets-Rays matinee at the Trop — or, for that matter, the entire series. Or for that matter ..read more

A dozen or so decades ago, the toast of New York National League baseball was a teetotaler projecting such a wholesome image, he was occasionally referred to in the press as the Christian Gentleman, though more readily as Matty or perhaps Big Six. Mostly, he was recognized as the indisputable ace of the Giants. His Hall of Fame plaque identifies him as Christy Mathewson, “greatest of all the great pitchers in the 20th century’s first quarter”. If your current New York National League franchise is winding down the first quarter of the next century by promoting a pitcher who puts a person in min ..read more

Jose Quintana reported for work without any of the essentials, got bombed, and the Mets fought back gallantly but it wasn’t enough, the end. That would suffice for a bite-sized recap, I suppose — this felt like one of the 50 or 60 or however many it is games that you’re guaranteed to lose, with the only asterisk being that the Mets scored a bunch of runs. The rest? I had trouble coming to any firm conclusions, not that any baseball fan with any sense should draw even mushy conclusions from a single game. Quintana was bad; the last time we saw him on a mound he was good as he’s ever been as a M ..read more