They say nothing is handed to you in this game … and, well, the Minnesota Twins were nice enough to spend the entirety of the fifth inning disproving this theory. They entered with a 1-0 lead and their pitcher, Jake Odoizzi, throwing a no-hitter.
They left it down 6-1, a parade of pitchers all but ushering a procession of Mets around the bases and doing so generously, without ever requiring the Mets the inconvenience of actually swing their bats. It was baseball as a Jackson Pollock painting — so hard on the eyes that it looked like Wes Johnson, the Twins pitching coach, wanted to punch a wall with his teeth by inning’s end.
“There’s a million ways to win a ballgame,” Mets right fielder Michael Conforto said. “Keep the line moving, keep passing the baton. That was the key tonight.”
Said Mets manager Mickey Callaway, laughing: “Keep on taking! Don’t swing!”
It ended 9-6, and it was hardly a thing of beauty, and the Mets didn’t care even a little bit. Because starting Thursday night, the Mets will play 16 games in 18 days against a slew of bright-light teams and boldfaced names. And by the time they’re done, we’ll have an absolutely clear picture of where this team really is.
“We’ve got to keep going,” Callaway said.
Between now and April 28, there will be six games with the Phillies, four with the Braves and three apiece with the Cardinals and Brewers, and those are just four of the five or six best teams in the National League. The Mets take off on this stretch 7-4 after surviving the slog-fest with the Twins, but it feels like an awfully tenuous 7-4.
Even Wednesday night offered few moments of easy breathing thanks to some adventurous times in the eighth and ninth innings — due to Noah Syndergaard, Jeurys Familia and Edwin Diaz allowing five runs among them. So far the Mets haven’t been forced to answer for the stretches of ballgames in which they played too fast and too loose.
Now they get the varsity. Now they get 2 ½ weeks of games against teams that will make them pay for poor bullpen work, that will make them pay for the nightly brain cramps that seem to infiltrate every game at some point (Wednesday’s culprit: Jeff McNeil, who nearly sabotaged the breakthrough fifth inning by, first, failing to race home from third on a wild pitch, then failing to get back).
Now, the season starts in earnest.
Now, the good teams come at them in a blur, and if the Mets are as good as they believe they are, if they are as good as they have shown in flashes of brilliance across the first 11 games, then we will certainly know about it by the end of the month.
A day after watching an imposter wearing Jacob deGrom’s No. 48 get lit up against the Twins, Syndergaard looked very much like himself for most of his outing, cruising through seven innings before finding trouble in the eighth.
“That was much-needed,” Callaway said. “We needed a starter to give us some length tonight. What you saw, that’s Noah Syndergaard.”
What we saw in these first 11 games, that’s what the Mets are, that’s who they are, that what they will take to the cream of the National League crop beginning Thursday night. They can be maddening at times. They can be thrilling at times. They can be unhittable at times. They can be unwatchable at times.
They are, to date, never dull.
Mostly, that’s a good thing.
Mostly, that’s been enough to launch the Mets off to a fine start, one that sends them out on the road within sniffing distance of the Phillies, tied with the Braves, a nose ahead of the Nationals. That’s the kind of horse race we expect the East to be all year. That’s where the Mets expect themselves to be.
Over the next 16 games, over the next 18 days, we’ll start to see just how realistic that really is.