In a few weeks, in one final dropkick to summer, we will turn our clocks back an hour, and darkness will descend upon our days earlier and earlier.
The Mets are going a different way. They are setting their watches all the way back to 2015, and by doing that they are trying to keep summer alive as long as possible, trying to keep their days and nights bright with October baseball. It is something to see.
“We played very well,” Carlos Mendoza said in the wake of an 8-4 comeback win over the Brewers Tuesday at American Family Field, on a day when it seemed every Wisconsin family was inside the building and roaring at peak volume. “We were ready for this.”
These Mets have channeled those Mets in a couple of ways already. In 2015, the Mets couldn’t get out of their way for weeks at a time, same as this one. There was a rolling tide of personnel changes at and around both trading deadlines.
And once the roster was complete, it felt like a different hero — remember Kirk Nieuwenhuis? Remember Wilmer Flores? Remember Kelly Johnson? Remember Addison Reed? — fell out of the sky every day through September. That team may have made the playoffs with more ease than this one, but at the end they only won one more game than this one.
It was in the playoffs when the ’15 Mets did their best work.
And these last two days, it feels like the ’24 Mets are doing their best work, too. Beginning Monday afternoon, Game 1 in Atlanta — which, let’s be honest, was a play-in game, if not a playoff game — and on through Tuesday night’s lid-lifter in Milwaukee, they’ve looked exactly like what they’ve been since June 1.
They’ve looked like the best team in baseball.
They’ve looked like as confident a bunch as a humbling sport allows, and once again baseball can be so mystifying; a few days earlier, in this very same ballpark, the Mets had looked like the terrified teenagers in a “Friday the 13th” movie, all of them waiting for Jason Voorhees to strike.
Now?
“You’re fired up,” Jesse Winker said. “It’s what you play the game for. It’s bigger than yourself. It’s bigger than all of us.”
It was Winker who threw the Mets’ first punch of October. Winker: addled by a long slump and back issues, inserted into the lineup to take some hacks against his ex-teammates. As a Brewer, Winker hit .199 last year, and so he isn’t exactly treated like Fonzarelli when he returns here; as a Met he hit .071 across 52 September plate appearances.
Naturally, he wiped out a 2-0 deficit with a two-run triple in the second, then scored the go-ahead run on a sac fly by Mark Vientos. Naturally, it would be Jose Iglesias who got the Mets back even at 4 because he refused to be beat to the first-base bag after old Mets friend Rhys Hoskins tried to rob him, diving in ahead of late-covering pitcher Joel Payamps.
Naturally, it was Vientos and J.D. Martinez (another September fog man with his .109 average), pinch hitting for Winker, who delivered two-run singles that broke open the game, and naturally, it was Jose Butto and Ryne Stanek who went nine-up, nine-down to close out the game.
Winker/Vientos/Iglesias/Martinez/Butto/Stanek: not one of them was near the Mets consciousness when they gathered for pitchers and catchers in Port St. Lucie last February. By the first of October, they were emerging folk heroes, all of them touched by the grace of 2015 — and 2024.
“I was really nervous,” Vientos said and if that’s so, it’s been hard to tell, since he’s emerged as the kind of high-energy in-season call-up that Michael Conforto was nine years ago.
And then there’s Mendoza, who on Tuesday pitched a TC — which is to say, every button he pushed worked perfectly, which was the kind of let-it-ride roll Terry Collins enjoyed in ’15, at least until the very end. Starting Winker. Subbing Martinez. Showing a commitment to Luis Severino’s heart when Sevy’s arm was sending other signals.
“When we play our game, good things will happen,” Mendoza said.
They did Tuesday at American Family Park, where less than a week ago the Brewers didn’t just beat them, they bullied them, at least until they played the JV squad on Sunday. Less than a week later, it was hard to believe the Brewers had gone 5-0 against the Mets this year when both teams were really trying.
Unless you remember that the Cubs went 7-0 against the Mets in the regular season in 2015, and then went 0-4 in the NLCS. The Mets haven’t copied the script to the end, not yet, they have another game to get. But the vibes are sure there. Turn your watch back to 2015. Hell, the Royals even won Tuesday.
