Casual Diehard

The A’s held their 50th anniversary celebration for the 1973 World Series yesterday, and Brandon Nimmo was not having it. In fact, Nimmo was so not down with the Oakland dynasty that he decided to make the day more about the 1969 Mets, emulating Fall Classic catches by Tommie Agee and Ron Swoboda.

Swoboda couldn’t help the Mets in 1973 against the A’s because he was traded with Rich Hacker to the Expos right before the 1971 season, in exchange for Don Hahn. It wasn’t Hahn’s fault that the Mets couldn’t take down Oakland 50 years ago, as he went 3-for-4 in Game 7 and was on base in the ninth inning when Wayne Garrett, representing the tying run at the plate at Oakland Coliseum, popped up to end it.

After the next season, Hahn was part of the trade that sent Tug McGraw to Philadelphia, and brought Mac Scarce, John Stearns, and Del Unser to New York. Scarce was traded a few months later for Tom Hall, who was meh out of the 1975 Mets bullpen and then traded to the Royals for minor leaguer Bryan Jones, who never advanced past A-ball, early in the 1976 season.

Stearns only played one game with the Phillies, then 810 for the Mets from 1975-84, so he had some extremely bad teammates over the years. Unser may be thought of as one of those, as one of the classic ‘70s dudes who couldn’t hit his way out of a paper bag — Unser had a .677 career OPS — but he did hit .294/.337/.392 for the 1975 Mets, with 10 of his 87 career home runs, a total that trailed only Dave Kingman (37) and Rusty Staub (19) on a team that hit a total of just 101 dingers.

The Mets traded Unser in July of 1976 to the Expos, along with Garrett, for Jim Dwyer and Pepe Mangual. Dwyer, who was in the majors until 1990, only took 15 plate appearances in 11 games as a Met, then was part of a three-team trade that sent him to the Cubs, Pete LaCock to the Royals, and Sheldon Mallory to the Mets. Mallory didn’t make the Mets out of 1977 spring training and had his contract sold to the A’s,where he played his only 64 major league games, hitting .214/.291/.262 with 12 stolen bases.

Mangual played nearly five times as many games as a Met than Dwyer did, with 49: the last 49 games he spent in the majors, hitting at a .183/.258/.294 clip before the Mets sent him to the Angels in a deal for Gil Flores.

Flores, then, was almost as bad with the bat in 81 games as a Mets reserve outfielder, hitting .213/.281/.279 with one homer, off Bill Bonham in Cincinnati on August 19, 1979. It was an inside-the-parker, according to Baseball Reference, and also didn’t save the Mets from a 6-5 loss.

The 1979 season wasn’t the end of Flores’ career. He went to Triple-A Tidewater in 1980 and stayed there for five seasons, stealing a total of 107 bases while playing alongside many of the players — Wally Backman, Jesse Orosco, Darryl Strawberry, and Mookie Wilson to name a few — who wound up winning it all with the 1986 Mets.

It’s not really a straight line from Swoboda to 1986, just as Nimmo’s catch yesterday wasn’t exactly the same… but it sure is enough to make you smile and remember why you love this game. If that’s the kind of thing you’re into. If it’s not, and you’re asking “who cares about this?” you can join Homer Simpson.

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The Toronto Maple Leafs are back in the playoffs again, looking for their first series win since 2004 again, and probably will find a way to lose again, because the playoffs always brings a bigger emphasis on goaltending and Toronto’s first-round challenge is taking on Andrei Vasilevskiy after a season in which the Leafs have used Ilya Samsonov, Matt Murray, Joseph Woll, Erik Kallgren, and even for a hot minute, Jett Alexander.

The 2003-04 Maple Leafs come up a lot because they were a good enough team to actually win one (1) playoff series. They were also, at the time, record setters with the highest regular-season points total in Leafs history at 103. They’ve surpassed that figure three times since, including this year, but not yet appeared in a conference semifinal, or division final, or whatever they want to call the second round nowadays.

Pretty good team, won a playoff round… doesn’t really capture it. Who was on the 2003-04 Maple Leafs?

Five Hall of Famers, for one thing. Largely winding down their careers, but still five Hall of Famers: Ed Belfour, Ron Francis, Brian Leetch, Joe Nieuwendyk, and captain Mats Sundin. Really, it should be six Hall of Famers, because Alexander Mogilny was there, too, plus a Masterton Trophy winner in Gary Roberts. And that’s just the guys on the ice because the coach was also a Hall of Famer, Pat Quinn.

Then there were five guys who aren’t Hall of Famers, but were solid NHLers, dudes who played 1,000 or more games in the league, the kind of fellas you’re going to want on your side in the playoffs: Tie Domi, Tom Fitzgerald, Calle Johansson, Bryan McCabe, and Matt Stajan.

It should’ve been more than five guys with 1,000 games, but remember that the NHL, reacting to the Maple Leafs winning a playoff series (not really, it wasn’t that rare at the time), canceled the entire 2004-05 season. Four more 2003-04 Leafs played at least 900 NHL games, but not 1,000: Tomáš Kaberle, Ken Klee, Bryan Marchment, and Darcy Tucker.

Even the list of players from this team who were just dudes… is pretty solid. This team had Nik Antropov, Wade Belak, Alexei Ponikarovsky, Robert Reichel, and The Other Guy From The Legion Of Doom Mikael Renberg.

The 2003-04 Leafs were a flawed team with most of its biggest names not in their prime, but what a collection of hockey talent in one place at one time. If they ever win another playoff series, will it be as much fun to look at that roster two decades later? We’ll see. Maybe.

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On this episode, we welcome Trevor Hildenberger, currently of the Sacramento RiverCats, formerly of the New York Mets, and forever one of the pioneers of Minor League Baseball players unionizing.

We talked a lot about that last bit on the show, but not at all about the Mets, so let’s give Trevor his due here as arguably the greatest strikeout artist in franchise history.

If we’re having an argument, we need to define some terms, and for the purposes of arguing that Trevor is the Mets’ greatest strikeout artist, the most important term is that we are measuring this with strikeouts per nine innings. Since arriving in New York in 2019, Edwin Díaz has a 15.4 K/9 rate, just behind Josh Hader at 15.6 in all of Major League Baseball for pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched over the last four-plus seasons. As it happens, Díaz and Hader each have pitched 208.1 innings from 2019 through this writing — Hader has 362 punchouts, six more than Díaz.

But does an artist really need a substantial body of work to prove their greatness? Or is greatness about what is achieved? There’s only one Sex Pistols album, and they’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (although they correctly refused to attend). So, what about the pitchers in Mets history with a higher strikeout rate than Díaz, but for whom the universe didn’t see fit to log more innings in orange and blue?

Hildenberger is, like Díaz, at 15.4 K/9 as a Met. Only, for Trevor that’s rounding down from 15.43, while for Díaz it’s roudning up from 15.38. Also at 15.43 is Kane Davis, who had 24 strikeouts over 14 innings in 16 appearances for the 2002 Mets. But in more than half of those appearances (9), Davis had either one strikeout or none at all. How can he then be in the conversation for greatest strikeout artist alongside someone (our pal Trevor) who struck out a pair of batters in each of his outings as a Met?

There are four pitchers in Mets history with a higher K/9 than Hildenberger, one of whom is Bryce Montes de Oca. We all hoped to see him adding to his strikeout total this season, currently 6 in 3.1 IP (16.2 K/9), but he’s now recovering from Tommy John surgery. So we can’t really say what we’ve got there.

Three more: Sam Clay, Bob Gibson, and Kenny Greer, each with two strikeouts in a lone inning of work as a Met.

First of all, not that Bob Gibson (though he was a Mets pitching coach), but the one who pitched 97 games for the Brewers from 1983-86, plus the eighth inning of the Mets’ 7-5 loss to the Astros at Shea Stadium on July 25, 1987. Gibson struck out Kevin Bass and the late Ken Caminiti (then a rookie) in his scoreless frame.

You might remember Clay from August 20 of last year in Philadelphia, where he pitched the ninth inning of an 8-2 win in the first game of a doubleheader. Clay struck out Bryson Stott to start what wound up being his only inning as a Met, and should have had the game end on a two-out grounder by Matt Vierling, only Brett Baty made his first major league error. That extended the game, which Clay ended by striking out Kyle Schwarber.

Greeer’s game is the coolest, and he got the win for it. On September 29, 1993, the next-to-last home game for a dismal Mets team, an epic battle took place between Bobby Jones (the main one) of New York and Rheal Cormier of the St. Louis Cardinals. Neither allowed a run.

Jones, in fact, pitched 10 shutout innings. Cormier went seven, followed by Paul Kilgus, Mike Perez, Lee Guetterman, Rob Murphy, and Les Lancaster. Relieving Jones were Jeff Innis for three innings, then Mauro Gozzo for another three… and then, to start the top of the 17th, a 26-year-old out of UMass whom the Mets had acquired 12 days earlier from the Yankees for Frank Tanana.

Greer, in his major league debut, came one pitch from striking out the side. Erik Pappas lined to left on a 2-2 pitch leading off, then Greer got Geronimo Peña swinging and Lancaster looking. In the bottom of the 17th, Eddie Murray (previously 0-for-5) led off with a single and Jeff Kent (previously 0-for-6) doubled him home for a 1-0 Mets win.

The problem with Greer’s case as a strikeout artist is that one of his strikeouts was Lancaster, a pitcher who hit .098 in his career and struck out 64 times in 132 career at-bats. Greer’s got one of the coolest stories for a one-game Mets career (he was on the 1995 Giants for eight games, as well), if not the coolest, but that’s not what we’re here for.

Gibson striking out Bass and Caminiti is neat, but Bass really just had the one good year and Caminiti didn’t get good until later. Clay had the strikeout equivalent of an unearned run.

Hildenberger, on the other hand, got two strikeouts in a scoreless inning at Coors Field, plus one of his strikeouts in Chicago was Willson Contreras, not an All-Star that season, but in seasons both before and since among his three career nods to date.

Also, Trevor came on our show. He’s obviously the greatest. Duh.

Oh, and this is the book Baseball Rules In Pictures that came off the shelf during the show. We will absolutely be digging into it more in the future.

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There have been 1,193 players who have appeared for the Mets, according to Baseball Reference as of this morning, but only 1,187 names for players in Mets history. Yesterday, Bobby Jones — an entirely different Bobby Jones than either of the Mets’ Bobbys Jones, and the golfer Bobby Jones, and not the Hall of Famer from the 76ers Bobby Jones either, that was the point — came up on Twitter thanks to my old Sporting News colleague Adi Joseph. It got me thinking… how many times have the Mets had that happen, the double Bobby Jones thing?

So, I went to the list of all-time Mets names and found the repeaters. Let’s take a look at these six pairs and declare the definitive Met for each name.

Sandy Alomar was traded from Atlanta to Houston around the start of spring training in 1967, then traded by the Astros to the Mets for Derrell Griffith at the start of spring training. At the age of 23, Alomar went 0-for-22 as a Met, and got traded to the White Sox in August of 1967 as the player to be named later in the Bill Southworth trade (the Mets also gave up Ken Boyer). Alomar was more significantly with the Yankees, playing three seasons in the Bronx, but mostly a California Angel. Anyway, here are the lowest OPS figures for players with at least 4,000 plate appearances in the live ball era:

Doug Flynn (1975-85): .560

Alomar (1964-78): .578

Tommy Thevenow (1924-38): .579

Mark Belanger (1965-82): .580

Ed Brinkman (1961-75): .580

In 2007, Sandy Alomar Jr. joined his old man in accumulating 22 at-bats as a Met. In the last eight games of a career that deserved better than 2.8% of the Hall of Fame ballot and going off the ballot in his first year, Alomar collected three hits: two singles and a double. The Mets’ third base coach at the time? Of course it was Sandy Alomar Sr., the definitive Met Sandy Alomar because of that coaching stint.

On May 10, 1967, with their original Sandy Alomar in the fold, the Mets purchased the contract of Bob Johnson from the Orioles. Playing all over the infield, but mostly second base, Johnson acquitted himself nicely in his first taste of National League ball, hitting .348/.377/.474 with five homers — the best hitting of his career, really. After the season, the Mets traded Johnson to the Reds for Art Shamsky, who became part of the 1969 championship team alongside Bob Johnson, a lefty pitcher. This Bob Johnson pitched two games for the Mets, and retired five of the seven batters he faced for a World Series-winning team (two quick outs to mop up against the Pirates on September 19, and a 12th-inning save at Wrigley Field on October 1). Johnson did pitch in the World Series against the Orioles, but not in 1969. He did that in 1971 with the Pirates, having been traded from New York to Kansas City (along with Amos Otis, oops) after the 1969 season for Joe Foy. The original Bob Johnson has a greater claim to the Mets’ throne of Bobs Johnson.

Bobby Jones, we don’t even really need to go deep on. He and Bobby Jones were teammates on the 2000 Mets, and whether you differentiated them as Bobby J. and Bobby M., righty and lefty, starter and reliever, or white and Black, there was never any question that the main Bobby Jones was the 1997 All-Star and former first-round pick — not the journeyman.

Mike Marshall is best known as a Dodger, either for winning the 1974 Cy Young Award or for his three-run homer that broke open Game 2 of the 1988 World Series, depending whether you decide to talk about him or Mike Marshall. In Mets history, neither is particularly significant. The pitching Marshall signed with the Mets in August of 1981, posted a 2.61 ERA in 20 appearances, and called it a career. On December 20, 1989, the Mets traded Juan Samuel to Los Angeles for the slugger Marshall and Alejandro Peña… Marshall was traded to Boston that July after hitting .239/.278/.411 with six homers in 53 games. Once again, can’t beat the original.

Bob Miller was a lefty who went 2-2 with a 7.08 ERA for the 1962 Mets (hey, that’s 5% of their wins!) after coming over from Cincinnati in May of the teams’s first season, along with Don Zimmer. Righty Bob Miller likewise ended his career with the Mets, joining the club near the end of the 1973 season after having his contract purchased from the Tigers, then sticking around through 1974. Neither is that exciting, go once again with the original for the Zimmer connection.

Last but not least, we’ve got Chris Young and Chris Young, and anyone who remembers the outfielder’s doomed stint in Flushing in 2014 knows that it’s the pitcher, here in 2011 and 2012, who is the ulti-Met CY.

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On this date in 1965, the Mets opened their fourth season with an 8-1 loss to the Dodgers at Shea Stadium. The 112-loss season didn’t even have a moment to gather oxygen before Maury Wills led off with a single, stole second, moved to third on a passed ball by Chris Cannizzaro, and scored on a Willie Davis double. Later that inning, being the 1965 Mets, it became 2-0 Dodgers when Davis scored on a foul pop to Cannizzaro. How the heck did that happen? Did any of our subscribers see the Mets’ 1965 opener?

If you did see that game, you might also remember that it became 5-0 in the fourth inning when Don Drysdale hit a two-run homer off Al Jackson. That was one of four homers that Drysdale hit in his career against the Mets, tied with Bob Gibson for the all-time lead among pitchers. The Mets have given up 95 homers all-time to pitchers, a number that figures to stay in double digits for many years to come, barring a wave of Shohei Ohtani copycats in the majors.

Drysdale hit a solo shot off Tracy Stallard in 1964 at Shea, the two-run dinger off Jackson in the 1965 opener, a tiebreaking solo blast off Warren Spahn in the eighth inning on June 11, 1965, and then one more on July 24, 1966, at Dodger Satdium, off Jack Fisher.

Stallard also gave up homers during his Mets tenure to Juan Marichal (1963) and Wade Blasingame (1964), which ties him with Ron Darling, Jacob deGrom, and Dillon Gee among Mets pitchers for giving up dingers to their opposite number. The king of this dubious category? Not surprisingly, it’s Tom Seaver, given the amount of opportunities he had.

Seaver gave up homers in 1969 to Dan McGinn and Fergie Jenkins (two of six homers that pitchers hit against the Mets that year (tied with 1962 and 2006 — Dontrelle Willis took Jose Lima, Oliver Pérez, and Roberto Hernandez deep that year — for the team record), Juan Pizarro in 1971, Burt Hooton (a grand slam) in 1972, and Larry Christenson in 1976. Tom Terrific got one of those dingers back in 1979, when he took Craig Swan out of the park in Cincinnati.

As a Met, Seaver hit six home runs, a team record since broken by Dwight Gooden, who tallied seven. Noah Syndergaard also hit six taters with the Mets.

What none of those guys did is hit a grand slam, something no Mets pitcher has done since Jack Hamilton on May 20, 1967… off Al Jackson. Hamilton gave back all four runs within two innings, left the game tied at 4-4, and watched the Mets build back up to a 9-4 lead before losing to the Cardinals, 11-9.

Mets pitchers have hit two grand slams, ever, with the other one hit in 1963 by Carl Willey at the Polo Grounds against the Houston Colt .45s. That total of two is equaled by the number of grand slams that the Mets allowed to pitchers in the final season at Shea Stadium: Félix Hernández (off Johan Santana) and Jason Marquis (off Jon Niese) both did it.

The Mets are 0-7 all-time when allowing a grand slam to an opposing pitcher. No team has given up more of them since 1962.

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Last night’s Mets game was a little weird. It’s not every day that Max Scherzer takes a no-hitter into the fifth inning, then leaves the game after that fifth inning even though all he gave up was a little single to Ha-Seong Kim. The 11-pitch strikeout of Austin Nola to end the fifth took Scherzer’s count up to 97 for the night, and in an April game where the 38-year-old issued six walks to go with his three strikeouts, the five scoreless innings equaled the limit.

No problem for Buck Schowalter, because John Curtiss, Drew Smith, David Robertson, and Adam Ottavino combined to strikeout eight of the 16 batters they faced in the final four innings, allowing only three walks and a ninth-inning single to close out the 5-0 victory.

Altogether, the Padres were 2-for-28 against Mets pitchers in the series opener, with 14 strikeouts. And that’s where we start generating a fun Stathead list.

Last night marked only the fourth time in Mets history that they have shut out an opponent, not allowed an extra-base hit, and recorded strikeouts in at least half of their foes’ at-bats. Where does last night fit into Mets history? Here are the other three games on this particular list.

April 18, 1970: Nolan Ryan never threw a no-hitter for the Mets, but he did record 27 outs in a row without giving up a hit in this game, led off by Phillies second baseman Denny Doyle with a single. Ryan walked Don Money, struck out John Briggs and Deron Johnson, walked Tim McCarver to load the bases, and then struck out Larry Hisle to get out of the first-inning jam. By the time Ryan got the ball back, he had a 3-0 lead… and completely shut down the Phils from there. Philadelphia batters went 1-for-29 with 15 strikeouts and six walks in the 7-0 New York romp.

May 15, 1970: Tom Seaver gave up a third-inning single to Mike Compton, the Phillies’ catcher, and got all the support he needed in the fourth inning when Woodie Fryman threw a wild pitch to score Donn Clendenon and Compton’s throwing error on that play allowed Ron Swoboda to come around as well. Seaver went the distance, striking out 15 as host Philadelphia went 1-for-29 against him at Connie Mack Stadium.

September 29, 2007: Game 161, when it seemed like maybe the Mets had figured it out and were going to salvage that season, a 13-0 demolition of the Marlins featuring two Lastings Milledge home runs and the Mets going 10-for-22 with runners in scoring position. On the mound, John Maine was nails, allowing only a pair of walks while taking a no-hitter into the eighth inning. Paul Hoover broke up the bid with a little infield single, ending Maine’s outing with 14 strikeouts and two walks. Willie Collazo got Alejandro De Aza to fly out to end the top of the eighth, and then Carlos Muniz notched the staff’s 15th strikeout of the day when he got Reggie Abercrombie to end the game. The Fish went 1-for-27, saving all their hits for the next day.

Scherzer’s early exit also is notable because it was the first time the Mets pulled a starter who’d given up one or no hits over the first five innings since Tylor Megill last April 29, in the Mets’ combined no-hitter against the Phillies. Megill and Jacob deGrom each had two starts apiece like that in 2021. The last seven Mets pitchers to do this — Scherzer, Megill all three times, deGrom twice, and David Peterson on August 13, 2020 against Washington — have recorded the win, after no Mets pitcher had gotten a win in such a game in 12 years following a Maine five-and-fly in Washington back in 2008.

Alongside Megill in getting pulled after five innings of no-hit ball? Sid Fernandez on May 15, 1987 against the Giants, when the lefty helped himself with an RBI triple but gave way to Doug Sisk with a 7-0 cushion in the sixth. Sisk gave up three runs, but Roger McDowell came through with the three-inning save.

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In 10 games, Pete Alonso has hit five home runs, the second time in his career that he’s started a season that way, as in 2019, the then-rookie made an instant impact with not only the five dingers, but 10 other hits for a .385/.429/.923 start to his career. To start this season, Alonso’s line is at .237/.326/.658. It’s been a weird first couple of weeks.

This isn’t a record-setting start, although Alonso does have as many homers so far as the Guardians, Nationals, and Tigers. Dave Kingman had the most dingerrific start to a Mets season, with seven in the first 10 games in 1976 — he wound up with 37 (of the Mets’ 102 total) home runs, finishing second in the National League to Mike Schmidt’s 38. While the season total for Kingman was first eclipsed by Darryl Strawberry in 1987, and now is just outside the top 10 in Mets history, the 7-in-10 start remains alone at the top, according to Stathead.

With six homers in the first 10 games of a season, we find Ray Knight in 1986 (finished with 11, plus one more in Game 7 of the World Series), John Buck in 2013 (finished with 15, all with the Mets before being traded with Marlon Byrd to the Pirates for Dilson Herrera and Vic Black), and Yoenis Céspedes in 2017 (finished with 17, played only 81 games).

Also with five for a nice 90-homer pace after the season’s opening 10 games? The aforementioned Strawberry on his way to breaking Kingman’s team record in 1987, Gary Carter in 1988 (finished with 11), and Jeff Kent in 1994 (finished with 14 in 107 games before the strike).

What’s next for Alonso, the first Met ever to start two seasons with five dingers in 10 games? He’s already tied for 36th on the team’s list for homers in the first 20 games, and the record there, the one that all Mets fans will want to see fall in the next 10, is shared by Kingman’s 1976 effort and the nine homers that Neil Walker hit to start 2016, on his way to going deep 23 times that year.

Alonso is currently tied for 11th on that list with his seven homers to start 2019, while the list at eight is fascinating, too: Frank Thomas 1962 (finished with 34), Kingman in 1982 (a league-leading 37 that time), Kent in 1994 (14), Todd Hundley in 1994 (16) and 1996 (then team-record 41), Richard Hidalgo in 2004 (and here’s where we note that this is in the player’s first X number of games, not the team’s, because Hidalgo joined the Mets in a June trade for Jeremy Griffiths and David Weathers, having already hit four homers for the Astros — he wound up wiht 21 in 86 games as a Met, still the record for most homers by a player with 145 or fewer games played with the club — Eduardo Escobar is currently at 21 homers in 145 games, and Byrd had 21 in 117, for what it’s worth, while Mo Vaughn is next on whatever this list is at 29 in 166), Carlos Delgado in 2006, and Céspedes in 2016 (31).

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(Editor’s note: Apologies for the delay in getting today’s episode posted. I got sick and missed going to the Mets’ home opener, too. NOT REALLY HAPPY ABOUT THAT, but they won, and that’s cool, and you should join the Discord. —Jesse)

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The Mets Are (Probably) Not Terrible

By Roger Cormier

I'm not someone inclined to tell others not to panic. I know from experience that if I am freaking the fuck out and someone tells me not to panic I then obtain the knowledge that yet another person exists in this world who does not know what the hell they are talking about. I'm simply going to show you a whole buncha numbers. 

1969  2-5

1973  5-2

1986  4-3

1988  4-3

1999  5-2

2000  3-4

2006  6-1

2015  4-3

2016  2-5

2022  5-2

Those are the records of the Met teams who ended up reaching the postseason, after seven games. It indicates that it is really, really, really early in the year. The Pittsburgh Pirates just swept the Red Sox. The Phillies are 1-5. Ask Pennsylvania if anything makes sense right now. 

The offense seems fine, except for Esco, which is fine because there are not one but two top prospects that could play his position in Triple-A rarin' to go. That leaves the pitching. The pitching…it's bad so far. Edwin Díaz is missed. Justin Verlander would be nice right about now. Max Scherzer is continuing his October performance. David Peterson and Tylor Megill haven't taken The Leap. Carlos Carrasco's velocity dipped precipitously the other day when he got smacked around by the Brewers. Kodai Senga is the lone bright spot. 

So what's the worst case scenario here? Old man Scherzer, Verlander, and Cookie are all done, finito. Teams figure out Senga's ghost fork. Petey and Tylor never evolve. Jose Quintana never throws a pitch in a Met uniform (I almost forgot about him entirely.) To paraphrase arguably the best owner of all-time, seven misfortunes? I'd like to see that! (I would not like to see that.)

Even if more than zero misfortunes occur with the starting rotation, keep in mind Steve Cohen has more money than God, and seems willing to spend it. They also have a top youth at first base (Mark Vientos) and shortstop (Ronny Mauricio), each of whom play positions that are definitely not available for awhile in the majors (no whammy). One or both could fetch a topline starter or two. 

I get it: the Carlos Correa thing was weird. That Super Bowl commercial was cool until one of its stars got sidelined for the year. It rained on "Amazin' Day". The home opener was rained out too, and it didn’t even rain. It's too early to pick up a vibe, but if there was one it's…blah. Vibes change pretty fast though. Like after a win or two. 

And now, some rejected Midjourney art with other possible titles for this episode as prompts

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Yesterday, Pete Alonso became the third Met with a multi-homer game in Milwaukee, joining Mike Piazza in 2001 and 2005, and Carlos Beltrán in 2005 (the day after Piazza, in fact). The Mets, of course, lost 7-6, falling to 2-2 all-time in these games.

The Polar Bear also tied the Mets’ team record for career home runs at the former Miller Park, joining Piazza, Curtis Granderson, and David Wright with five. Alonso has done it in 12 games and 52 plate appearances, combined to 14 and 58 for Piazza, 14 and 61 for Granderson, and 31 and 145 for Wright.

The Mets’ record for Milwaukee homers, though, still belongs to Piazza with eight, thanks to his three dingers at County Stadium. Next on the list, with six, is Frank Thomas, who blasted off half a dozen times from 1962-64, and still does have the Mets’ single-ballpark Milwaukee career home run record for now.

You can tell that a place has bad mojo for the Mets when a positive record, even one this particular, still stands from 1962. The bar is on the floor, and as we saw this week, when they get to Wisconsin, the Mets still have no idea how to clear it.

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