As in, a 14-4 mess Wednesday to sweep a two-game set, leaving the Mess (er, Mets) 5-1 since the All-Star break.By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.com/2019/07/17/the-mets-leave-the-twins-a-mess-for-now/
Pete Alonso hits . . . not just a two-run homer
but a conversation piece Wednesday in the
eighth.Until the All-Star break the Twins, of all people, looked like the shock of the season with reasonable ownership of the American League Central. And the Mets looked like the National League’s clown show without the benefit of drawing laughs other than those mixing disgust and dejection.
Twins fans have taken the ride savouring every day so far. Mets fans have laughed like Figaro—that they might not weep.
Except when Pete Alonso catches hold of one, with or without men on, in the eighth inning or otherwise. Then, Mets fans weep for sheer joy. Unless their jaws hit the floor as on Wednesday afternoon, when Alonso didn’t just hit a two-run homer, he hit something liable to be picked up on satellite-orbiting radar.
This was one day after the Mets kind of snuck a 3-2 win past the Twins. A former Minnesotan of my acquaintance habitually believes anything good from the Twins is an illusion and anything bad a matter of established fact, phrasing it as politely as longtime Twins fans are reputed for being. Then came Wednesday’s top of the eighth and it was too much for even the most cynical Twins fan.
Who did the Twins think they were all of a sudden—the Mets?
It began with a walk. It climaxed with a monstrous home run. In between came the sort of thing for which the Mets are only too well disregarded and the Twins aren’t exactly among baseball’s most notorious practitioners.
Twins reliever Matt Magill opened by walking Robinson Cano, the designated hitter on the day, who’s come to that point in his career where he’ll take his base any way he can get there, unfortunately for the Mets. Then, Magill struck out Todd Frazier and Michael Conforto swinging in succession. Followed by Amed Rosario shooting a base hit up the pipe for first and second. And then it happened.
Mets second baseman Adeiny Hechevarria sent a fly toward the left field track. Eddie Rosario, sunglasses wrapped snugly around his eyes, drifted back with a perfect bead on the ball until, so it looked, even the sunglasses couldn’t keep his eyes focused as the sun hit the lenses with a nova-like blast. The ball descended to his glove, then rebounded right out of it.
Cano and Rosario hit the jets and scored handily. Then Jeff McNeil doubled off the right field wall to send Hechevarria home. Dominic Smith—who’d smashed a pinch-hit three-run homer to give the Mets a 5-3 lead in the first place an inning earlier—sent McNeil home with a single.
Up stepped Alonso. He looked at two sliders sailing up to the plate under the strike zone floor. He looked at another slider hitting the inside wall of the zone, barely. Then he saw a slider hanging up in roughly the same spot, maybe an inch further on the inside of the plate. And he sent it halfway up the third deck past the left field fence, bouncing off an empty seat and past a female fan who’d bent over futilely trying to grab the ball.
It was only Alonso’s first bomb since he won the Home Run Derby in Cleveland over a week earlier. But the 474-foot flog couldn’t have been any deadlier if he’d hit it with a sledgehammer and not a bat.
Magill got Mets catcher Wilson Ramos to ground out to end the carnage—temporarily. The Twins kindly sent reserve shortstop Ehire Adrianza out to take one for the team in the top of the ninth. The poor guy ended up taking three for the team thanks to a two-run triple (Amed Rosario) and an RBI double (Hechavarria).
Alonso himself looked as though he took pity on the Twins when he ended that inning with a hard ground out to third. Then Mets reliever Chris Mazza shook off a run-scoring ground out in the bottom of the eighth to work two solid relief innings and finish the 14-4 flogging.
These Twins opened the day with a cozy five-and-a-half-game lead over the Indians in the AL Central. But the Indians spent Monday and Tuesday dropping sixteen runs on the toothless Tigers for 8-6 and 8-0 final scores. And the Tribe didn’t seem likely to just roll over and play dead for the Detroit pussycats Wednesday night.
All of a sudden, the Twins thumping and bumping their way into being one of baseball’s 2019 feel-great stories looked very vulnerable after the Mets got through with them in a two-game set.
It didn’t start that way for the Mets. Already in certain disarray because of assorted issues and controversies on the field, in the clubhouse, and in the front office, they were forced to change plans when Zack Wheeler—scheduled to start Tuesday, in a certain trade-deadline-period showcase—hit the injured list with shoulder fatigue instead.
Forcing the Mets to turn to a bullpen game by using Steven Matz, a starter recently moved to the bullpen to fix himself, as an opener. Maybe it was an omen, because a lot of the kind of peculiar fortune that went against the Mets so far on the season went their way for a change.
Like in the top of the first, when McNeil and Conforto moved to third and second on a passed ball, Cano sent McNeil home with a sacrifice fly, and an error by Jonathan Schoop at second allowed Conforto home. Like when Rosario got to score while Conforto beat out a grounder to shortstop in the top of the fifth. And when six Mets relievers kept the Twins scoreless—despite loading the bases on closer Edwin Diaz—after the fourth.
A little more of that and a lot less of the kind of thing that turned them into a hybrid between nursery school and a slapstick academy and the Mets might not have made the wrong kind of truth out of rookie general manager Brodie Van Wagenen’s preseason challenge, “Come get us.â€
Don’t look now, but the Mets are 5-1 including now a four-game winning streak since the All-Star break. And they’ve just taken a pair from the reputed threshing machine of the AL Central, including Wednesday’s human rights violations. It may or may not mean a turn of their sad seasonal tide, but this was one time the Mets didn’t need to ponder calling their therapists after a game.
Nor does being sliced, diced, pureed, and nuked Wednesday afternoon mean the Twins face a turn of their otherwise joyous seasonal tide in the wrong direction, either, just yet. But you might forgive them if they pondered calling Dial-A-Shrink for a few minutes.
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