Yep. This figures. This makes sense. The Yankees and the Mets played two games this week, and they split those two games. They played four games this season, and won two apiece. That’s New York baseball summed up perfectly and properly in the final days of July. Win one, lose one. Win a few, lose a few.
Quicksand everywhere.
We keep waiting for someone to make a big, bold statement, something that, loosely translated, would read this way: “No, really, we’re so much better than you think. We’re so much better than we look. We’re so much better than we’ve played.”
Instead day after day, week after week, month after month, the soundtrack for the baseball season remains one long, extended yawn. If you picked up the newspaper Thursday morning and started doing the crossword puzzle and saw a three-letter word with a clue of “the 2023 baseball season in New York City,” the answer would be easy.
“MEH.”
The Yankees salvaged a win Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium thanks to a splendid start from Carlos Rodon, thanks to perfect 10-up, 10-down work from their bullpen, thanks to the Mets making a couple of bad plays and suffering a couple of brain cramps. It is a nice prelim for a challenging upcoming 10 days, but they really could have used a sweep.
The Mets? Let’s all make a pact with each other regardless of how the surreal mathematics of the National League work right now: let’s suspend talking about the wild-card race until a) we see what kind of team the Mets have starting next Wednesday and b) they find a way to make a serious run at .500. Can we agree on that?
“We hit a lot of balls hard tonight and they found gloves,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said. “We hit some balls soft [Tuesday] and they fell in. That’s the game.”
“Oh, man, we’re in ‘let’s go, baby,’ ” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “We understand where we’re at, down to the last couple of months and we understand how important these games and series are.”
The Yankees are expected to get Aaron Judge back this weekend, and that can’t come a moment too soon because Friday starts a 10-games-in-10-days stretch that ought to tell us, once and for all, who they are and what they can be. They get three against the Orioles in Baltimore then come right back home for three against the Rays and four against the Astros.
Boone has talked all season about how everything the Yankees want to accomplish is sitting there for them. This is exactly the kind of stretch he’s been talking about. These next 10 are their equivalent of Saturday afternoon at Augusta, Moving Day at the Masters. The Yankees have taken four full months to ease into the season. It’s time to seize it.
It would’ve been helpful to bank a five-game winning streak heading in, but the Mets got in the way of that by battering Domingo German and clobbering the Yankees 9-3. Wednesday? Wednesday was reminiscent of a famous and fateful line Leo Durocher once uttered in the summer of ’69, after his Cubbies beat the Amazin’s and he was asked if that was the real Cubs.
“No,” the Lip said. “That was the real Mets.”
It felt like Thursday was more about the Mets revealing themselves than the Yankees revealing themselves. That time is now for the Yankees.
The Mets? They do have a tempting stretch of seven games against the Nationals and Royals upcoming but if there is a theme to this season through 101 games it is this: they are never more dangerous than when they tease and taunt you with a couple of positive signs. Something is always lurking behind a corner.
Maybe they prove us wrong. Maybe in two weeks we’ll look up and the Yankees will have rallied around Judge, flipped the narrative, flipped the standings, and finally injected a little bit of life into a lifeless baseball season. It’s worth rooting for, if it isn’t necessarily worth counting on.
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