The thing is, it doesn’t get easier from here. Let’s take it on faith that the Mets are going to qualify for the postseason (the magic number for doing that is only eight, with 20 games to play). Regardless of what round will kick off their October — NLDS (best case) or wild-card (worst case) — they’re going to face some serious pitching.
That means the offense needs to be opportunistic, timely, clutch, relentless — in other words, the way their offense hummed for much of this season. But not lately. Not always. One of the sure signs you’re playing bad teams is that when you pounce on them early, they’ll provide little resistance. The Mets won four games like that in Pittsburgh and Miami.
But if you allow them to stay in games, and if you allow pitchers to gain confidence against you … that’s a different story. Then you’re in a grinding game, and it doesn’t matter if the opponent is a 95-win team or a 95-loss team: that’s going to be a tough way to survive the night. That’s how the Pirates and Marlins won their games last week.
It’s how the Cubs, 23 games under .500, won Tuesday night, a 25-year-old rookie named Javier Assad escaping trouble early and lasting six solid innings for his first big-league win, 5-2.
And in October, it won’t be Javier Assad coming after you. It’ll be Aaron Nola or Julio Urias or Max Fried. It’ll be Yu Darvish or Clayton Kershaw or Justin Verlander. You aren’t going to collect a lot of crooked numbers against the likes of them. You have to be opportunistic. You have to be timely. You have to be clutch. You have to be relentless.
The Mets were 0-for-4 Monday night.
“We left a lot of people on base,” manager Buck Showalter lamented.
Mark Canha reacts after striking out against the Cubs on Monday. Charles Wenzelberg / New York PosThey left three on in the first, allowing Assad to squirm off the griddle. They left three more on in the eighth, and that was the troubling one. They’d loaded the bases on an infield hit by Jeff McNeil, a hard single by Pete Alonso and a walk to Daniel Vogelbach. There have been an awful lot of games this year when this was precisely when the Mets were at their most dangerous.
Three cracks with the tying run at bat.
Three chances to close the gap, make the Cubs start wondering, as bad teams will, and allow the Mets to believe, as good teams do.
Mark Canha struck out.
Eduardo Escobar flied out, too shallow to score McNeil from third.
And Darin Ruf, buried in a horrific 1-for-32 quicksand of a slump, lined out to right.
And that was that. Francisco Lindor hit a ninth-inning homer, but the Mets didn’t frighten Cubs closer Brandon Hughes. The modest crowd (28,081) exited quietly.
And that means that in the Mets’ five most recent losses to the Nationals, Pirates, Marlins and Cubs — combined 127 games under .500 — the Mets have scored 1, 1, 2, 3 and 2 runs. Now, there are a lot of nights where the Mets can survive that. Juts not on a night when Chris Bassitt, who’d been brilliant since July, doesn’t quite have it.
That can happen to a pitcher against anyone, even a lousy team like the Cubs. And it can happen in October, too. Sometimes, even against the very best, you’re going to have to figure out how to score some runs. It helps to score runs the way the Mets have done it most of the year — not overly reliant on the long ball, plenty reliant on taking advantage of base runners whenever they appear.
Jeff McNeil reacts after striking out to end the game.Charles Wenzelberg / New York PostIt’s hard to describe what the Mets are in as a slump, in truth, because for all the aggravating nights that yield a minimum of runs there have been plenty of outbursts, the Mets taking advantage of poor pitching and teams mailing it in. They aren’t pressing when they’re up 8-1. But trailing 3-0, as they did early Monday, pressing is natural.
The bat is gripped tighter. Maybe the ball doesn’t seem quite as big.
“It’s frustrating,” Ruf said. “But it’s baseball. It happens.”
He was talking about his own miseries, but could’ve been speaking on behalf of a team that’s trying to negotiate its way through the tape with the Braves still chasing it. It isn’t easy. And it’ll get no easier once the second season arrives.
