Damn It, Mets, You Suckered Me Back In

Just when I thought I was out the Mets suckered me back in. 

I haven't really been watching their games this year, but I would check in on them from time to time. I was happy when Francisco Lindor snapped his hitting slump. Watching Kevin Pillar get hit in the face and come back two weeks later was great. The Dodgers were also a team I was following a bit, because when I first started watching baseball again last year during the NLCS, and I liked watching them play and was rooting for them in the World Series against my other home town team in the Rays with some mixed feelings about that because I root for Tampa teams. (But seriously, how did Tampa Bay become Champa Bay all of a sudden?) But because the few Dodgers games I got started at about 10 pm when I was waking up to go to work at 4:30 am, so I was already asleep by the time the first pitch was thrown.

The team whose games I watched the most of was the Cubs. I was lucky enough to get a lot of their games on MLB Network in the afternoon, so when I would get home from work I would still have half a game to watch. And the play I loved to watch was Javy Báez. Even before I started watching games again and I would just watch highlight montages on YouTube, I would watch his a lot. He is incredible offensively, defensively, on the base paths. He sometimes makes other players forget how to play baseball. We all know what play I'm talking about. He's called El Mago for a reason.

And then the Cubs blew up. The core gone. Anthony Rizzo's a Yankee now when being a Yankee kinda sucks. Kris Bryant joined the best team in the league. And now the Mets have got me watching games again because they got Javy.

And he was doing some Javy things. He was hitting and doing impressive slides. And he just so happened to join up when the team was starting to slump. Then he had to go on the injured list and the Mets continued to lose. But the swept the Nationals after two rain delays. And then lost two close games and one blowout to the Dodgers and continued to lose to the Giants until the day Steve Cohen publicly called out the team's offense. 

I managed to catch this game just after they tied it in the top of the 9th as soon as I got home and settled from work. Ans it was so exciting watching them manage to hold and catch up to the Giants, and then pass them in the 12th with Kevin Pillar's 3-run homer and Chance Cisco's RBI double on his first pitch as a Met. 

But after this they face the Dodgers again in LA and the Giants at Citi Field, and I don't want to jinx things so I'm not going to share my hopes. It's just that Javy should be coming back in the next few days, Francisco Lindor is making progress with his oblique injury, Noah Syndergaard is starting to pitch again, and they are hopefully getting Jacob deGrom back in September. It's tight between them, the Braves, and the Phillies, and that's all I will say. There's still quite a bit of baseball left to play. 

But damn it, Mets, you suckered me back in.

journal, thoughts