The Mets are going to give the baseball to Jacob deGrom on Saturday with winter looming on the other side of midnight, and they are going to hope that the version of deGrom that shows up is closer to vintage deGrom than the one version showed up in Oakland and Atlanta in his two most recent starts.
It’s a good place to begin the business of salvaging a season.
But if you have watched this team all year, you know something else.
You know they cannot rely solely on deGrom, because even if he’s sharp, Citi Field is going to feel like a crackling cauldron of gloom, the longer and deeper things remain 0-0. The longer the Mets’ bats remain refrigerated, the more ominous Citi will feel. You know that’s true.
As Max Scherzer said after this desultory 7-1 loss to the Padres that pushed the Mets’ backs to the brink: “Baseball can take you to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. This is one of the lowest of lows.”
Here’s the thing:
It is a fact that the Mets were built around the hope that deGrom and Scherzer could carry them as far as their 30-something right arms would allow. But they survived long stretches of this season without both of those stars.
Pete Alonso, walking back to the dugout after striking out in the fourth inning, and other key starters need to get the Mets off to a quick start in Game 2, The Post’s Mike Vaccaro writes. N.Y. Post: Charles WenzelbergThey did that, mostly, by attacking games early, setting a tone, and letting the rest of the game take care of itself. The Mets were 81-16 in games in which they scored first this year, the best record in the majors.
They have had their comebacks all year, sure. Mostly, however, they have been front-runners, because mostly they have been first-runners. They get ahead. They stay ahead. That’s the plan. That’s the blueprint.
Saturday night, that is the imperative, even more than deGrom reclaiming his past glory. Because deGrom can be brilliant — and can be damn near unhittable — and it won’t matter if the Mets can’t get him a lead.
The Mets need to get him — need to get themselves — a lead. The earlier the better.
Or else there’s no telling how ugly and uncomfortable things might get at Citi.
“They did what we didn’t do,” Francisco Lindor said of the Padres. “They capitalized on mistakes.”
He also said, more tellingly: “It sucks not scoring runs.”
Saturday, not scoring runs will be fatal. Not jumping on Blake Snell if they can — as they had the opportunity to do early Friday against Yu Darvish — will mean that it will be impossible to remember any of the 101 victories the Mets accrued this year.
Francisco Lindor watches the action during the seventh inning of the Mets’ Game 1 loss. N.Y. Post: Charles WenzelbergThey need to score early. They need to give themselves a lead, because that will be the only way they have a puncher’s chance. In so many ways, Game 1 of the wild-card series Friday felt like Game 4 of the series against the Braves — a continuation of the nightmare stay in Atlanta last weekend.
“I know we have our work cut out for us but I’m confident,” Pete Alonso said. “We have a challenge and we’ll face it head-on and we’ll run toward it.”
It is on Alonso and Lindor and Brandon Nimmo to jump-start this offense, get it on the board early, even if it’s not a crooked number. The Mets never had a chance to do that Friday. Josh Bell crushed a Scherzer pitch over the left-field wall with two outs in the first for an early 2-0 lead.
The Mets could have made things feel a lot differently if they’d seized similar early opportunities against Darvish. In both the first and second innings they had a runner on third with one out and couldn’t push him across. Darvish struck out both Alonso and Eduardo Escobar before escaping both innings.
Now, as poorly as Scherzer pitched, maybe that wouldn’t have mattered. And if deGrom is going to mirror Scherzer on Saturday — the same as Scherzer mirrored deGrom last weekend at Truist Park — it’s not going to matter in Game 2. The Mets need deGrom to act like a $40 million pitcher in what may be his final start for them.
But that’s not all they need.
Snell is good and he is crafty and he has had plenty of October success, so it won’t be an easy task. But it shouldn’t have been easy for the Padres to splatter Scherzer all over the yard, either. The Mets need to get a lead. They need to play from ahead.
All but 20 of their 101 wins came that way. If they’re going to get to 102, it’ll behoove them to behave as they did for most of the regular season. There will be plenty of time to join their bats in hibernation if they don’t.
