Maybe whatever season the Mets are going to have the rest of the way started this past weekend at Citi Field. Doesn’t mean that it has. But in a season when just about everything has gone wrong for them, for the past two days things went suddenly and improbably right. And guess what? Mets fans will take what they can get at this point.
Their team was 18-26 after a Friday night loss to Cam Schlittler. It meant that the Mets’ record was now 53-84 since they’d been 45-24 a season ago and still looked like one of the best teams in baseball last June (they finished with a 38-55 stretch last year). On Friday night they’d watched Clay Holmes, the ex-Yankee who’d been one of their bright spots this season as a starter, suffer a broken fibula on a comebacker hit by Yankees rookie Spencer Jones.
But after that, and out of nowhere, there was at least hope again at Citi Field, and two straight wins, one as crazy as they’ve had in a long time, against the Yankees or anybody else.
First there was the one on Saturday night. With the Mets holding on to a two-run lead, another ex-Yankee, Luke Weaver, got out of a bases loaded, no outs jam in the top of the seventh, striking out Amed Rosario and Trent Grisham and getting a ground ball from Anthony Volpe. Later Devin Williams -- yeah, another ex-Yankee -- threw a 1-2-3 ninth, and the Mets had gotten a game.
The Mets had shown some life coming into the Yankees series, of course, having just swept the Tigers. But this win felt so much bigger. Just not as big and loud as Sunday afternoon would be. You know by now that the Mets somehow hadn’t won a single one of their last 96 games when trailing after eight innings. So when it was 6-3 Yankees going into the bottom of the ninth, it was another one of those moments that felt like the bottom of the season for Mets fans.
Then with two outs, Tyrone Taylor hit a three-run shot that hooked safely around the foul pole in left. It was suddenly 6-6 at Citi Field. After Devin Williams pitched a scoreless top of the 10th, Carson Benge hit a chopper over the mound, and Volpe and Max Schuemann collided trying to make a play. For the second time in a week, one of the Mets kids -- Carson Benge -- had managed to push the winning run across home plate. Crazy win, making the place go a little crazy.
“Awesome,” Taylor would say when it was over. “All I can say is awesome.”
The Mets have lost Holmes at least for a few months. They still don’t have Francisco Lindor, who is out with a significant left calf strain. Their catcher, Francisco Alvarez, could miss 6-8 weeks with a meniscus tear. Jorge Polanco, who was supposed to be the first baseman -- at least most of the time -- that replaced Pete Alonso, has left Achilles bursitis and has played just 14 games, hitting .179. Bo Bichette, the Mets' biggest free-agent acquisition of the offseason, is still hitting just .210 and dropped a popup on Sunday before the big comeback began.
Through it all, manager Carlos Mendoza -- who held his team together brilliantly in his rookie season two years ago -- has repeated the same litany:
“We just got to do better.”
And so the Mets left for a series with the Nationals having won five of six. At a moment when Holmes went down and the Mets could very well have stayed down, they didn’t, after nearly a full season of having looked like a team as bad as any in the sport, more than 30 games under .500 over those previous 137 games.
“Yesterday felt different,” Mendoza said on Saturday regarding Friday’s loss to the Yankees when Holmes went down.
The rest of the weekend turned out to be different for the Mets, when they did so badly need something good to happen. There is no question that their two prized young position players -- Benge and A.J. Ewing -- have added so much energy, and in Ewing’s case, speed that makes him look like a streak of light.
And at a time when the Yankees have had plenty of bullpen problems even before Bednar threw that hanging curve to Taylor, both Williams and Weaver have been terrific for the Mets. Williams has given up just one hit in his last 8 1/3 innings and Weaver has had 7 1/3 shutout innings of his own.
“We didn’t play our best,” Mendoza said on Sunday after his team’s crazy 7-6 win. “But we fight.”
This team is not the team Mendoza managed two years ago, one that fought back from 22-33 all the way to Game 6 of the NLCS. Alonso is gone and Brandon Nimmo is gone. There is so much for them to still overcome, especially with the way the Braves are playing and the Phillies have started to play in the NL East.
But the Mets have showed fight when they had to. For this one weekend, they got back up in such a big way. Maybe Opening Day came late to Citi Field this time. And hope along with it.