It was Jason Bay who used the words. He wasn’t the first, of course. Anyone who’s watched these Mets play any or all of their first 44 games of the season has used the same words — or variations of them, spiced with as much profanity as personal preference allows.
The Mets had always sought euphemisms.
Not now. Not after surviving a sweaty 5-3 win over the Yankees, all five of the runs coming with two men out. Not after wrapping another temporary lifeline around their waists, shooing away the negative vibes for another 24 hours, at least. Now they could afford complete honesty. With themselves.
And with everyone else.
“Our offense,” Bay said, “has been underachieving. No doubt about that.”
Bay, of course, probably could defend a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject by now, after seven weeks observing the New York baseball meat grinder from up close. The Citi Field faithful actually have been somewhat patient with Bay, despite his short power numbers — one home run, 16 RBIs even after last night’s 4-for-4 with three runs scored.
Part of that may be because it’s hard even for Mets fans to boo someone who wakes up this morning with a .298 batting average, and who’s seen at least a half-dozen well-struck flyballs die gruesome Citi Field deaths so far this year. And part might be because those folks are so otherwise pre-occupied with the all-consuming struggles of Jose Reyes and David Wright.
But last night, even Reyes and Wright had two hits apiece, and Wright’s were especially meaningful, both coming against hard-throwing righty Phil Hughes, both coming with two outs, both coming with Bay on second base, allowing the Mets to crawl out to a precious early lead.
“I don’t think any of us has ever talked about underachieving in this room, because once you verbalize it in here you’re almost guaranteed to start pressing because now it’s Out There,” Bay said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious, too. We see what everyone else has been seeing.”
Mostly, what people have seen is a gaping hole in the middle of the Mets’ batting order on too many nights, too many at-bats when Bay and Wright both have been flailing and hitting air molecules instead of baseballs. The two of them still have 101 strikeouts between them, a shocking total that skips drearily close to 400 over the course of 162 games.
It isn’t that anyone expected them to rake like Manny and Papi used to back in the day, when the Red Sox used to send fear into teams innings in advance as those teams wondered and worried how they would deal with the heart of that batting order. Bay and Wright weren’t billed as a crosstown version of Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez, RBI automatons who turn the Yankees offense into a pinball machine when they’re cooking.
Individually, Bay and Wright haven’t killed the Mets. Collectively, they have. At the least their absences have. Until last night.
“You can’t sit there and live and die with every at-bat,” Wright said. “You’re going to come through sometimes, and sometimes you’re not. You can’t ride the emotional roller-coaster every at-bat. It’s only human to want success.”
And to his credit, he wasn’t going to celebrate one important game any more than he seemed willing to wallow earlier in the week, when his struggle started bubbling over.
“It’s one game,” Wright said. “I know it’s the Yankee series, but it’s one game. A couple of hits, a couple of RBI. I couldn’t care less about the strikeouts. If I have a good at-bat and strike out, then I tip my cap. I’m not going to slap the ball around just to put the ball in play.”
And Bay?
“I’m not frustrated,” he insisted. “Really, I’m not.”
The Mets have to hope — have to believe — that the two of them have made it through to the other side, that while both Bay and Wright will surely have their individual lapses of performance over the next four months, they won’t jump off the cliff together like Butch and Sundance again any time soon, leaving a batting order black hole in their wake.
They did fill the boxscore, together, for one of the few times all year last night. If it still isn’t perfect, it also wasn’t a terrible place to start.