ATLANTA — This is the reminder of just how intoxicating the sport can be when you allow it to be. Games like these are the flip side to games like those, and if you are a Mets fan you don’t need be reminded what “those” games are.
“That,” Robert Gsellman said, “was fun.”
And that is not a word the Mets have often used lately, not one they expected to use when they were facing Julio Teheran — who traditionally is kryptonite with arms when facing the Mets — and they were throwing Jason Vargas, who has spent most of the season lighting himself on fire.
(Speaking of fires … There was a fire at Citi Field Wednesday. Honestly. No joke. An actual fire. Nobody was hurt, so it’s OK to let loose a hyena-like peal of hysterical laughter if you’d like because, read that sentence again: THERE WAS A FIRE AT CITI FIELD WEDNESDAY. No word if there were tires or dumpsters involved.)
So, naturally, the Mets won the game, 4-1. They avoided dipping below .500 for the first time all season, they split a series they easily could have swept (though it was still hard to believe that they themselves weren’t swept, even after Gsellman, closer for a day — at least — recorded the 27th out).
They got five strong innings from Vargas (who was working on three days’ rest, no less) and they got a couple of clutch RBIs from Smilin’ Brandon Nimmo (who, come to think of it, is the one person in baseball who could probably find the silver lining in a stadium fire).
And then, in the bottom of the eighth, with runners on the corners in a two-run game and every one of the 21,449 (plus all of the Braves, plus a sizeable number of Mets no doubt) waiting for the inevitable other shoe to drop, Amed Rosario made the kind of play — stabbing a hard-hit grounder by Nick Markakis, starting a 6-4-3 double play that extracted setup-man-for-a-day (at least) Jeurys Familia from likely doom — that made so many talent evaluators drool not so long ago.
“It’s the play we’ve been lacking,” manager Mickey Callaway said, “and probably the difference in the game.”
It was a good day for the Mets but an especially good day for Sandy Alderson, architect of this team, overseer of a roster that seemed suspiciously skinny at season’s start and has been exposed as being thinner than a Kleenex with 109 games still to go. On this day, though, the three key elements of this win that nudged them back over .500 at 27-26 and still somehow kept them within 4 ½ games of first place were all covered in Alderson’s fingerprints.
All three have actually been part of the growing indictment a swelling number of Mets fans have brought against Alderson. There is Vargas, of course, the $16 million man who was only available to pitch Wednesday because he’d been unbearably bad in a brief outing in Milwaukee on Saturday (and “unbearably bad” was actually an upgrade from his first three starts).
There was Nimmo, who is quickly becoming a fan favorite with a nice package of attitude, hustle and production but was Alderson’s first No. 1 draft pick in 2011 and took an eternity to pay dividends in a time when more and more stars have been making the leap before they reach legal drinking age.
And there was Rosario, formerly a top-two prospect in all of baseball, who is destined to forever be compared to his New York middle-infield contemporary, Gleyber Torres, and has had to watch Torres become a phenomenon in about 15 minutes. It also doesn’t do any favors for Rosario — and certainly not Alderson — when division rivals like the Nationals and Braves can dip easily into their systems, as they have, and pluck out Juan Soto, 19, hitting .375 with a 1.022 OPS and Ronald Acuna Jr., 20, who electrified Atlanta immediately upon his arrival in late April.
Rosario, of course, arrived in Flushing amid plenty of expectation and has been slow to honor it. But he did have a triple, a double and two runs scored and lifted his average to .265. And while he booted one routine grounder earlier in the game, he made the heart-stopping, game-saving play in the eighth.
“He’s had his ups and downs,” Callaway said, “but his ups …”
He paused before continuing, and really didn’t have to, because those are the things that add to baseball’s recipe as an hallucinogen. These are the moments you allow yourself to forget why you were so mad as a fan to begin with. Even if it’s only temporary. After all, as we were reminded Wednesday, a fresh fire can break out again at any time. And in the most unexpected places.