Now in NLCS, Mets Insist 'Job Is Not Done'
Now in NLCS, Mets Insist 'Job Is Not Done'
ALSO: BALLPARK FACTORS WILL INFLUENCE DECISIONS OF FREE AGENT HITTERS
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Reader Reacts
“Compare Mike Cuellar’s 6 great years from 1969-1974 to Sandy’s 1961-66.
He never gets mentioned as an HOF candidate.”
— Jim Kaat, Hall of Fame, Class of 2022
[Editor’s Note: Cuellar went 185-130 with a 3.14 ERA in 15 seasons, winning 20 four times and taking one Cy Young Award.]
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Braves hitters posted a collective line of .243/.309/.415, leading to a league-average wRC+ of 100 — a huge drop from 2023 when Atlanta collectively hit .276/.344/.501 for a league-leading 125 wRC+. The team’s run production dropped so severely that hitting coach Kevin Seitzer was fired after a 10-year run with a year left on his contract.
On May 9, the Astros were 13-24, leading only the Chicago White Sox, but went 75-49, best in the majors the rest of the way . . .
The Yankees were 24-7 against AL Central teams, including 13-6 marks against the Royals, Tigers, and Guardians . . .
Since 2017, the Bronx Bombers have eliminated AL Central teams six times in six tries with an overall mark of 15-5, but gone 0-6 in six meetings against the Astros or an AL East rival (5-15 overall record) . . .
Yankees southpaw Carlos Rodon had a 4.64 ERA in his first 20 starts but a 2.91 mark in the dozen that followed . . .
Kudos to Kansas City for fattening up on the bad teams (12-1 vs. the White Sox, for example) and barely holding their own against everybody else (74-75) . . .
Three-time Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw (bone spur on big toe) won’t pitch in the post-season no matter how far his Dodgers advance . . .
Former AL MVP Jose Abreau, who turns 38 in January, hopes to recapture his lost batting stroke in winter ball and earn his way back to the bigs.
Leading Off
“The job is not done.”
Says Mets Division Series hero Lindor. He’s bloody right.
By Jeff Kallman
"Every kid in Philly tomorrow," said Phillies relief pitcher Matt Strahm, after last Sunday's National League division series Game Two, "is going to pretend to be Bryce Harper or Nick Castellanos, batting in the bottom of the ninth."
Every kid in Philadelphia come Monday through Wednesday, alas, was going to wish he was anyone but Harper's and Castellanos's teammates. It'd be too much to ask every Philly kid to wish he could manhandle Francisco Lindor in the Game Four sixth. Some might even call it child abuse.
What started as a 1-0 Philadelphia lead thanks to a fourth-inning Mets infield error turned into the bases loaded and one out for the Mets when Lindor checked in against Phillies reliever Carlos Estevez, lately their closer, this time with the unenviable job of pushing Lindor to one side before taking care of Mark Vientos.
Estevez fell behind 2-1 when he served Lindor a fastball almost perfectly set into the shortstop's wheelhouse. And Lindor sent it on a near-perfect parabola over the center field fence, into the Phillies bullpen, for the only four runs the Mets would need to send themselves to a National League Championship Series date and the Phillies to another offseason's heartbreak and introspection.
"That was such a special moment,” said Mets relief pitcher Ryne Stanek, “for a guy that is so special to this team and so special to this city. I mean, that’s how you’d write it if you could write the script. You know what I mean?" Yes it is.
Good luck selling the script, though. This was one of those nobody'd-believe-it moments, even in a deliberately-scrambled postseason in which baseball is closer to letting all team in that you might think or fear.
In today's system, there's no more guarantee of the World Series featuring the season's best of the best. In this system, the regular season now comes to the thrills, chills, spills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place, if not further. But, as Edward R. Murrow once said of the overpredicted, over-analysed 1948 election campaign, it couldn't hurt to watch, anyhow.
“I felt like Ricky Bobby,” said Pete Alonso, the Mets' first baseman, who had a pretty hefty belt of his own when he laid wasted to their wild card series opponent Brewers with a loud, deficit-overthrowing three-run homer in that Game Three ninth to help sent the Mets here in the first place.
Continuing the damn Will Ferrell reference, Alonso said of Lindor's blast, "My hands were just like, in the air, just in awe. Just an unbelievable swing. I mean, that was the swing of a lifetime."
Maybe the swing of the past decade's worth of lifetimes. Before Lindor unloaded, the past decade saw only four lead-changing bombs of any type: Alonso himself last week, plus Yordan Alvarez (Astros, vs. the Phillies, 2022 World Series), Harper (2022 NLCS, vs. the Padres), and Howie Kendrick (Nationals, 2019 Series, vs. Astros.)
The only previous Met to hit a lead-overthrowing grand slam that proved the gamer in any game, regular or postseason, was Ike Davis in April 2014, down a run to the Reds in the ninth when he unloaded. But this was different. Way different.
This was the guy who'd been carrying the Mets like two heavy duffel bags on his shoulders most of the year, before a September back injury put his postseason-to-come plus every other Met fan's mental health into critical condition until he managed to return for the last strides of the postseason run.
Just don't make the mistake of treating it like it won the World Series in advance. No matter how loudly Citi Field exploded, no matter how badly the Mets wanted something like that to happen, Lindor himself knows a lot better.
"I want to win it all," he said postgame, while one of his little daughters sat on Daddy's lap with a Gatorade bottle adjacent to her little lips. "And ours will be a team that will forever be remembered. This will be a team that comes every ten years and eats for free everywhere they go. And I want to do that. I want to do that. But the job is not done."
The job is not done.
Remember those words. Bank on this much: the Phillies will. They're saying the same five words, perhaps with a little more emphatic voice than the Mets.
Just ask their reliever Jeff Hoffman, who found new life in Philadelphia. He'd only surrendered sixteen earned runs in six months, but now he stood as one of the saddest faces of a Phillies bullpen the Mets manhandled all week. He came into a fifth-inning jam and quelled it without blowing the 1-0 Phillie lead. Then he told manager Rob Thomson he could go back for more.
Oops.
"I wanted the ball in my hand,” he said. “In my head, I would’ve had a clean one right there, and then gone back out for another one. Whatever the team needed. But it just didn’t happen that way." Indeed. He opened the New York sixth by walking J.D. Martinez and wild-pitching him to second, hitting Starling Marte with a pitch and then wild-pitching both to second and third, before walking Tyrone Taylor.
Hoffman caught a break when Mets catcher Francisco Alverez forced Martinez out at the plate. But the pillows were still full of Mets. Lindor was due in the batter's box.
Thomson lifted Hoffman for Estevez. And Lindor lifted Citi Field into hysteria while the Mets bullpen continued keeping the Phillies from even thinking about getting frisky at the plate.
"Give them their credit," said Castellanos, who knows along with several teammates that this won't quite be the same Phillies team next season. "They beat us. Are there a lot of things that we could have done better? Yes. Are there things that we could have done different? Yes. Do I think that they are a better team than us? No. But this series, they were.”
The Phillies may have owned the National League East most of the year but they went 6-8 to finish September while the Mets went precisely the opposite (8-6). The Mets split a season-ending doubleheader with the Braves to get to the wild card series. (Lindor won the first game with a walk-off bomb to ensure the Mets' slot.) Then, taking the Brewers 2-1 in the wild card set merely proved the prelude to a staggering division series week.
Somehow, the Mets out-hit the Phillies in this set, .269/.186.; 36-24. They hit seven homers to the Phillies’ three but they relied as much if not more on finding holes through the infield and gaps in the outfield. They outpitched the Phillies (2.78 ERA/5.82 ERA) and, somehow, got more out of their taxed bullpen than the Phillies could out of theirs.
Now, Harper’s and Castellanos’s back-to-back Game Two bombs in the sixth, plus Castellanos’s walk-off single to tie the set at a game each, will become two more memories turned from sweet to sour. For the Phillies and their fans.
Will the Mets secure Lindor’s Wednesday damage as a true legend in team lore? Or will they go from here to their own heartbreak rendering that just a pleasant, briefly-savoured memory?
The job is not done.
They need to remember it starting Sunday, no matter who came out atop the Dodgers-Padres schoolyard scuffling for them to wring their way past.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Ballpark Factors Can Lure or Repulse Free Agents
By Dan Schlossberg
Statcast’sPark Factors Index reveals Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium — long regarded as a pitchers’ park — was the fourth-friendliest hitting park over the last three years. It trails only Coors Field (Colorado), Fenway Park (Boston) and Great American Ball Park (Cincinnati), with Yankee Stadium and its ridiculously-short right-field porch merely tied for 13th.
But what about Wrigley Field when the wind is blowing out and Citizens Bank Park, where pitchers come to die?
Controversies of all stripes keep the cauldron of baseball churning and this is just another example.
Free agents invariably consider ballpark factors — from elevation to dimensions — before they sign on the dotted line.
It’s a known fact that the Rockies have trouble luring pitchers, while hitters are reluctant to sign with San Francisco, where the Bay beckons home run balls but few actually arrive. Just ask Jorge Soler, who was traded there, or Aaron Judge, who refused to sign there.
Just as right-handed hitters love The Green Monster, which towers over left field at Fenway Park in Boston, left-handed batters wish they could play all 162 games at Yankee Stadium.
Juan Soto, whose lefty swing helped push the Yankees deep into October, is living proof — and will give the club every consideration in contract negotiations now that he's a free agent with an enormous price-tag.
Righties, on the other hand, have an advantage at Houston’s Minute Maid Park, where the scoreboard sits just below the Crawford Boxes, and in Atlanta (see Hank Aaron). But not so much in CitiField, Petco Park, or Busch Stadium.
Duke Snider, who hit left-handed, loved aiming at the short right field of Ebbets Field but hated hitting at the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the Dodgers played before Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. Wally Moon, however, learned to hit to the opposite field — and his so-called Moon Shots flew over the close left-field fence in the converted football stadium.
As for the horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds, the distance from home plate to the right-field foul pole was 254 feet. Even left field was close, at 279 down the line, but center seemed miles away. The only three men to reach the center-field bleachers were Joe Adcock, Lou Brock, and Hank Aaron.
Having the clubhouse in fair territory even helped Maury Wills, whose speed helped him leg out an inside-the-park home run against the 1962 expansion Mets. Wills even hit a “traditional” home run in the same game when he took advantage of the short left-field wall.
At Wrigley, which Greg Maddux once called home, the winds off Lake Michigan could be helpful to pitchers when blowing in but harmful when blowing out. Maddux figured he broke even with the atmospherics in the well-named Windy City.
Wind can be a factor anywhere. The Kansas City Royals will watch the rest of the playoffs on television in the wake of a howling gale that was blowing in during the fourth and final game of the AL Division Series against the Yankees at Kauffman Stadium Thursday night. Balls that would have cleared the fences any other night became easy outfield outs.
Free agents can pick and choose and free agent hitters will have 30 different choices. It will be interesting to see how ballpark factors influence their decisions.
Former AP newsman Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ covers baseball for forbes.com, Memories & Dreams, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Sports Collectors Digest, and many other outlets. He’s been Weekend Editor of Here’s The Pitch since it was founded. Email Dan via ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: Mets Magic, 2024 Edition
“They aren’t the best team in this derby, which is down to eight now, but they just may be the toughest.”
— New York Post sportswriter Jon Heyman on the 2024 Mets during the NLDS
After starting 0-5 and limping into late May with a 22-33 mark, the Mets caught fire and roared all the way to the playoffs . . .
They did it largely without cleanup man Pete Alonso, who had no significant home runs between April 5 and October 3, hitting a career-worst .232 with runners in scoring position, but then hit one that will live in Mets history, sending the team into the NL Division Series when all seemed lost . . .
His ninth-inning blast against Milwaukee closer Devin Williams came on the anniversary of Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world,” which won the pennant for the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 . . .
The Mets had managed just two hits, both singles by Francisco Lindor, before Alonso deposited a 3-1 pitch into the right-field stands just beyond the outfield fence . . .
It gave the Mets their first win in a post-season series since 2015 . . .
Alonso has more home runs than any player since he came into the National League in 2019 and promptly hit a rookie-record 53.
Extra Innings: Tropicana Field Hurricane Disaster
Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a Category 3 storm near Sarasota, Florida area. Although its winds eventually subsided to 90 mph, accompanied by more than a foot of rain, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays took a big-time hit.
Its roof didn’t survive.
The slanted, fixed-dome cover, made of Teflon-coated fiber glass and supported by cables, started ripping apart at the height of the storm. Soon, all of it was gone, with debris scattered all over the field below.
That wasn’t good news for first responders gathered there for protection. Many wound up hiding in the interior corridors rather than resting on any of the thousands of cots that dotted brought in for the occasion.
Repairing the roof will be expensive for the Rays, who lost their Port Charlotte spring training park for one season after Hurricane Ian ripped through southwest Florida a few years ago.
Tropicana Field, which opened in 1990, had an $18 million renovation in 2006-07 but replacing the roof could cost more. And can it be done before the 2025 season?
The stadium is already reviled as the worst in the majors, which is why the Rays plan to build and occupy a new St. Petersburg facility in the near future.
That future can’t come fast enough — especially if any more hurricanes impact the hard-hit area.
Reports of damaged spring training ballparks are also coming in.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.