PHILADELPHIA – The weather channel says there will be “abundant sunshine” on Thursday, with the temperature reaching 66 degrees with an odds of 70 degrees. Rain? Only 6 percent chance. It’s going to be one of those baseball afternoons that will make you want to channel Ernie Banks if you’re lucky enough to have a ticket:
“Let’s play two.”
If you’re more lucky, the Mets will play a little differently from their last out-of-town tryout, a listless 8-2 loss to the Phillies on Wednesday afternoon, or else you might have a different well-known phraseology on your tip. tongue.
“Let’s try to beat traffic on the LIE,” is one that comes to mind.
“Can’t nobody play this game here?” is another.
“BOOOOOOOOO !!!” is a reliable old standby.
OKAY OKAY OKAY. They are three games. It’s a series. There is still plenty of ball game left, a lot of season, 159 games and more. The 1969 Mets started their season 2-5 and 3-7 and 6-11. The Mets of 1986 started their 2-3 season. Early April is to work out kinks, set the tone and start the season. To check. To check. To check. To check.
You still have to worry a bit about what you saw these first three games. You still have to hope that the home pinstriped version of the Mets (maybe a throwback black jersey top for too long) will start to look substantially different by 1:10 or so Thursday afternoon, when Taijuan Walker heads to the Marlins’ Corey Dickerson and the Mets play for Citi Field witnesses for the first time in 18 months.
Because it hasn’t been pretty.
Where to start? Well, the bullpen setbacks continued on Thursday. The Mets were already with their heels flush against the cliff when Jacob Barnes trotted out of the cage in relief from David Peterson. Barnes was trying to sneak a fastball past JT Realmuto on his first throw when a Met and Realmuto hit one in the general direction of the William Penn Building.
Peterson had a forgettable start to his sophomore year, his ERA for the season sitting at a neat 108.0 four batters in the game. Michael Conforto, reportedly under contract for a nine-figure deal, stranded nine runners, giving him 16 LOBs in the Mets’ first three games, an almost ridiculous total. Manager Luis Rojas sat with Jeff McNeil for no good reason.
Aaron Nola, Philly’s ace, almost begged the Mets to take him out on a day when his “C” stuff was barely working.
The Mets said, “No thanks. Were good. “
It was a full bowl of misery and the crowd of 10,807 people at Citizens Bank Park rejoiced. The Phillies seemed an afterthought for most of the spring, seemed like one of the few teams coming north, but they stormed through their opening standings 5-1 against the Braves and the Mets, the three-time division champions and the likely No. 1 challenger .
And don’t think the Phillies didn’t notice this disrespectful pecking order: they pulled up a double steal from six points in the sixth. It enabled them to score a point on Dellin Betances. Betances was the sixth Mets-reliever of the season; all six runs surrendered (Joey Lucchesi finally snapped that gruesome streak with two clean innings).
All of this will accompany Mets’s home.
In any case, we know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the weather will be nice. After a year where the term “abundance of caution” has been a go-to mantra to tackle the daily foil of coronavirus, “abundant sunshine” is sure to be a welcome change.
Now the Mets just have to go along with the script.
“You see resilience, you see guys fighting,” Rojas said, searching in the dark for fun things to say about his team (and, really, someone with the Mets should show him old ties from Rich Kotite press conferences. ; he seems to be borrowing heavily. That’s not a good thing). “I see the boys doing the same, always persevering.”
Trying is fun. The effort is commendable. But the Mets promised more than anything we’ve seen so far, in word and deed. Maybe it’s just the early April product. Maybe they will be fine once they go through their routines. Until we see it, these will be questions we will keep asking. Out of an abundance of caution.