You get these sometimes. They sneak up on you. They aren’t must-wins, because if you’re playing must-win baseball games in August, you honestly don’t have much of a baseball season on your hands.
So the Mets weren’t facing a must-win early Monday evening, as they touched down in eastern Missouri on the always-popular Anaheim-to-St. Louis-to-Denver itinerary that would get most self-respecting travel agents fired. It wasn’t a gotta-have-it game against the Cardinals lifting off in the late-afternoon shadows.
It was a sure-might-want-to-win.
It was a sort-of-would-really-like-to-have-it.
The fact that they won 6-0 was nice, though hardly a huge needle-mover with 50 games left in the schedule. It only draws them even at 2-2 on this 10-game, four-city trip. It only allows them to keep shooting par in the daily parlor game of stick-and-move among the six or so candidates for the National League’s three wild-card slots. It did clinch the season series over the Cardinals if it comes to that for the Mets, so that’s nice.
Still. This felt sneaky important. The Mets just lost two out of three to an Angels team that looked every bit as bad as its record and still gave the Mets fits. They have all these road games in August. And road trips can become funny things — 1-3 can become 1-7 and then 2-8 in a hurry, no matter that three of the games are against the lowly Rockies.
As we saw over the weekend, there’s really not a great team in the major leagues right now, certainly not one that stands out. The Marlins, who just completed a yard sale at the trade deadline, went into Atlanta and took two out of three from the Braves. The Rockies gave the Padres all they could handle. The Cubs, left for dead in the middle of last week, took three out of four from the Cardinals at Wrigley this weekend.
Not long ago, the Phillies and Yankees seemed on a collision course for the World Series with 110 wins or so apiece — unless the Orioles got in the way. Then the Yankees spent six weeks in an offensive coma and the Phillies spent their own six weeks in clown-shoe hell. The Orioles started losing every night. The Yanks seem to have righted themselves nicely and the Phillies won in Seattle on Sunday and the Orioles won the final two games in Cleveland. But while they’re still the three teams to beat, it’s beginning to look more and more like a wide-open October awaits for whomever the 12 playoff teams wind up being.
So this road trip is a tricky path for the Mets. And so Monday, while not exactly essential in and of itself, was a quintessential test for a team still trying to convince the rest of the league that they’re as good as their last two months or so.
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza surely acted that way, shaking up his lineup. Pete Alonso, hitting a hard-to-fathom .198 with runners in scoring position, was dropped to fifth, a switch the batting order has been crying out for for weeks. Brandon Nimmo was dropped from two to three and J.D. Martinez from three to four, and Tyrone Taylor was installed in the two hole and delivered the game’s biggest hit, a bases-clearing double that gave the Mets a five-run lead.
“It’s great when it works,” Mendoza said, “but it’s baseball. Sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it doesn’t. This was nice. We’ll take it game by game. I don’t think you’ll see him in the two-hole tomorrow, but that’s baseball too.”
What’s also great for this team is when Sean Manaea cruises through seven strong innings; he now has allowed no runs, and has 21 strikeouts and one walk for his last two games and 14 innings.
“He was nasty,” Taylor said.
Manaea was nasty and Taylor was clutch and the Mets won and were able to get on the plane for Denver knowing that at worst they’d arrive exactly where they’d started the day, and 2-2 on a trip that’s now 40 percent in the books. There are still 50 games to go. There are still those five other teams, and maybe one or two more, grappling for those three playoff slots, a year after two wild-card teams met in the World Series, in a baseball season when the old New York Lottery slogan — “you gotta be in it to win it” — has never seemed more relevant.
You can’t win a playoff spot this early in August. But you sure can lose one. Every now and again you get one of these: a sure-might-want-to-win, a sort-of-would-really-like-to-have-it. Put it on the left side of the hyphen. Get back on the plane. Fifty games to go.
