Nothing to be alarmed about, but now I have a different reason for temporary spotty availability. But while I’ve got the chance to say it I was shocked the Mets didn’t do any more at the trade deadline and underwhelmed with what they did but that it appears to be working so well shows how little I knew, and not for the first time. The takeaway as I see is Billy Eppler and Steve Cohen’s hedge-funded baseball geniuses might know more than me and I should trust them now, or we’ll find out I was right along but now I don’t want to right now.
I never thought Contreras, even as he fit one need rather nicely, being a catcher who could hit, was quite the right solution (catchers are hard to break in the best of circumstances and with Alvarez en route, foolish to put those kinds of expectation on him in the moment). It also tells us the Mets had seen enough of the each of nearly every opening-day best-case-scenario options at DH (Robbie Cano, Dom Smith and JD Davis), have all three failed given the shots they had; but also they saw none of the temp-depth guys (Inciarte, Jankowski, Blankenhorn, Lee, Plummer) belong here at least now.
Plus Tyler Naquin was the last of the three Reds I might have taken soonest (Luis Castillo and Tommy Pham were available too, no surprise).
And that they had a lot more faith in me of the following:
We’d see Jacob deGrom ever again.
That Trevor May would ever resurface. Maybe even Tylor Megill.
That the problem with Drew Smith wasn’t, as I’d suspected, part of the bad luck all around the night Max Scherzer called for the trainer and walked off the mound, when it appeared all Smith could do to resist an inappropriate thing on on a baseball field with 30,000 watching with one of the three Sports Illustrated swimsuit models throwing out a ceremonial first pitch right there between home plate the pitcher’s mound (she seemed to be considering it is all I’d say as a body language interpreter in the Promenade that night). Instead it was some kind of injury, only the kind of injury that makes you give up way too many home runs.
So that’s also why we have Mychal Givens in the bullpen, along with May, and deGrom is in the rotation but I missed most of the game. Givens is a guy whom I know Buck trusted, so you have to think he asked for it too and though so and I’m beginning to definitely trust in Buck. Like Megill, Givens’ first name seems spelled wrong too.
Quick wrapup for these Mets who are unpredictable in all the right ways and went sneaky-smart at the deadline when balls-out was the seeming call to action.
Naquin is hitting the crap out of the ball in 25. Givens is No. 60. Darin Ruf (who seems to spell his first AND last names improperly) was assigned 28 and platooning with Babe Ruth Vogelbach at 32. That Davis-Ruf trade was also a straight-up Uni-Swap and I think the Mets paid more for him and for Vogelbach as I liked Holderman and Davis but I’m not arguing with results.
That was a magical win over Atlanta last night, in a magical year, and they did it while the Braves did seemingly did so much more to prepare. I watched the game last night and wanted nothing more that to be there. That was something, and I was at the Wednesday night Yankees game.
Someday I’ll tell that story.
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This site, kind of like the Mets, has struggled a little recently. Without getting too deeply into detail, there was an issue of a disagreement between my antivirus software and my domain host, that prevented me, or rather, just made it too complicated, to promptly update the site, and between that, and a new job I have that’s incredibly busy, and the fact that my keyboard needed to be replaced, etc etc … I fell way behind and makes it look as though this site (meaning, me) was not paying attention to the Mets, even though I was (the database, for example was being updated). It was like being gagged. Over the 23 years I’ve operated this site, it has survived a few similar periods, and … there’s more work to be done.
Me, I’ve veered between worry and elation over the last month or so. Neither of the home-and-home sets with Houston was in any sense encouraging, except, if you could step back and say to yourself, as I’ve often said to myself this year, that we are still witness to one of the very best Mets seasons ever (though not necessarily the best Mets *team ever) and one thing about the 2022 Mets, the 1986 Mets and the 1969 Mets clubs was, they struggled against Houston in the regular season.
Since the last time we “talked” (looks it up… mid-May, Jesus!) we’ve seen the return of Tommy Hunter, now wearing 34; the debut of Ender Inciarte in 22; a ghost appearance by Gosuke Katoh in 25; guys like Jake Reed return, still wearing 72; and yesterday I guy I swear I never heard of, nor even knew was in the organization, but has played on several MLB teams, R.J. Alvarez, shows up wearing 71 in the bullpen. Did I forget anything? I mean, other than how to maintain a website?