The Wrong Night

The prevailing thoughts among Mets fans following their streak-snapping 6-1 loss last night pretty much used logic to ease the internal pain they were undoubtedly suffering.

There will, in the span of a 162-game Baseball season, be nights like this, where Jacob deGrom doesn't have it, his pitches are up and hittable and the opponent has professional enough hitters to take advantage of that.

There will be nights where they play in a stadium that's clearly skewed towards generating more offenses, and balls will be hit there that sail over the fence, when in Citi Field, the same ball usually lands in Juan Lagares' mitt somewhere in Right Center Field.

There will be nights where the opposing team's pitcher, maligned and often injured, puts it together and simply dominates the Mets, whipping demon fastballs and hellacious sliders that nobody can catch up with, and will make the Mets 4-day old Catcher look like he's back in the sandlot.

There will be nights where the Mets enter the game with a modest winning streak, or perhaps a historic winning streak and all these kinds of things will conspire to the end of a Mets loss. It happens. That's just baseball and even the best teams tend to lose 60-65 games a season. This sort of thing is unavoidable. When a game like this happens now, with the Mets on a 11-game rampage, you just kind of lick your wounds and say "come back tomorrow," especially given the panache of the next day's starting pitcher. And at 13-4, the Mets still look pretty damn good in the grand scheme of things.

But if they had to have a night like this, and yes, I know they had to have a night like this eventually, why the hell did it have to happen at Yankees Stadium against the Yankees, thereby giving every mullet-headed mouth-breather that roots for that team the opportunity to hang that over us and say things like "duh slobber drool SEE YOU STILL CAN'T BEAT US. SAME OLD MUTS werp warp worp." The loss, I can accept. The Mets weren't going to finish out the season on a 157-game winning streak (as nice a thought as that might be). But if they were going to just not have it like that, I wish it didn't have to happen against the Yankees. That's what every Met fan is trying to not say this morning.