What are the most stressful playoff odds for a baseball team to carry into a mid-August contest? Maybe it's something relatively high, like 75 percent, where the fear of collapse overshadows every move they make. Maybe it's a long shot, bringing with it the burden of knowledge that the rest of the season must be practically perfect. But I submit it's probably something like the 32.2 percent the New York Mets took into their home game against Baltimore on Tuesday—just enough to offer some hope (at least to me and the other attendees), and just enough to make it hurt when they play, logically, like a team that's probably disappearing before October.
In an era of baseball with higher standards, the 2024 Mets would already be forgotten, entering Tuesday as they did peering across an 8.5-game chasm in the division and a 5.5-game deficit for the first wild card. But because MLB wants as many clubs as possible to appear just good enough, the Mets were only a game and a half out of a postseason they've made just once in the past seven years. Better yet, Monday had been a triumph for the team, as young catcher Francisco Alvarez demolished a baseball in the bottom of the ninth for a walk-off dong and a semi-respectable 65-60 record.
On Tuesday, however, the Mets sputtered, as mediocre teams do. José Quintana allowed seven runs in the first five innings, and even though a three-run bomb from J.D. Martinez in the eighth cut the lead to 7-5, turning the ballpark into a club for the duration of a pitching change and letting me bask in some old Tigers nostalgia, the Mets couldn't get another runner on base for the rest of the night and fell, 9-5.
If only that was all. Sprinkled throughout the game, and emphasizing the gap between these the two franchises, were a number of New York defensive misfortunes, screw-ups, and humiliations. The best of these, which sure looked amazing in the moment, was this Brandon Nimmo not-a-catch in left field, where he chased a long Colton Cowser fly to the track, knocked it off the wall with his glove, batted it up in the air with his bare hand, and then caught it for no reward as he fell. Cowser would go on to score from a sacrifice fly.
The Mets were only down 3-1 in the fourth, but this Ramón Urías tapper, which he probably could have accomplished just as easily with a pool cue, scored Cowser (again) all the way from second and set up a two-run James McCann dong, because Alvarez abandoned his spot at the plate to whiff on the scoop. This isn't how baseball is supposed to work!
The Martinez dong really was sick, and for all my complaints I can't say I've been to a better game where the home team was buried 7-1 in the middle of the eighth. But the worst of the Mets' dysfunction was still to come in the ninth, helping to score two insurance runs and delivering both a burst of pained laughter and my greatest challenge as a scorekeeper yet. Nimmo failed to collect a sliding catch on a blooper hit to left by Gunnar Henderson, and his throw home went well wide. Danny Young then threw to third to try to nab Ryan Mountcastle, but his toss was even worse. Mountcastle scored, Henderson got all the way to third, and any threat of a Mets comeback was soundly dead.
These are the saddest of possible words: "The Mets may still have a chance." Closing a 2.5-game gap with 36 games left is totally reasonable. Of all the MLB teams not in playoff position, they have the shortest distance to cover. It's for this reason that the Mets will be allowed to torture their fans for the remainder of the season. The Mets are not a playoff team. Fifteen years ago, they wouldn't even be close to a playoff team. And on Tuesday night, they didn't look at all like they could be a playoff team. But hey, check out those standings. Ya gotta believe—and that's how they getcha.
