Despite collapse, Mets did the right thing at trade deadline

PHILADELPHIA — Baseball players are the most resilient of all athletic species. It isn’t a choice. You either learn how to adapt to the daily grind, the daily water flume, or it’s time to find another way to make a living.

So the Mets’ clubhouse Friday afternoon just past 4 o’clock looked as it would look in April, in June, in September, felt the way it would look in the middle of an eight-game winning streak as opposed to a six-game losing streak. The Cubs-Brewers game played on a couple of TVs. Some players read mail.

Noah Syndergaard, two days after absorbing the worst beating of his life, noticed a member of the Mets’ traveling media who is staying at the team’s hotel.

“I charged a few meals to your room,” he said. “Now I need your Netflix password.”

Resilience.

“This group especially seems to take everything in stride, good or bad, high or low,” manager Mickey Callaway said, a few hours before his team would try to halt its losing streak against the Phillies and Aaron Nola, who is gaining on the outside in the National League Cy Young race.

“We have a tall order in front of us,” Callaway said. “But we’ve got to get it done.”

If the Mets didn’t arrive in Philly with their season in tatters, necessarily, it was certainly edging toward a point of no return. All the hard work in sneaking within a half-game of the first wild-card three weeks ago, to within two of the second wild-card as recently as a week ago, had gotten cut up the past six games as if being shoved through a paper shredder.

The TV brought no relief, either: the Cubs jumped out early on the Brewers at Wrigley Field. That would mean the Mets knew they would likely gain no ground no matter what happened on the field at Citizens Bank Park in a few hours. If the mood wasn’t grim, or glum, the outlook sure was.

“We have to make sure everyone stays in the right place mentally,” Callaway said.

Despite this sudden plunge back to the emotional depths of early July, the Mets did the right thing by giving their fans — and themselves — the August they gave them. As the season began to slip away this week there were plenty of revisionist historians who revisited the Mets’ trade-deadline decisions to retain some tradeable assets and add Marcus Stroman (who hasn’t exactly been 1984 Rick Sutcliffe since changing leagues, let’s be honest).

It’s a fair opinion. But it also fails to account for two things:

1. The Mets weren’t going to pull off an Aroldis Chapman steal by dangling the likes of Zack Wheeler or Todd Frazier, and if they were going to be blown away, Herschel Walker style, for Noah Syndergaard or Edwin Diaz, that simply didn’t happen

2. There has been value to the games the Mets have played in August, and on a couple of levels.

For a few weeks, a genuine mania returned to Citi Field for the first time in three years. The three games with the Nats earlier this moths were as loud and as boisterous as regular-season games have gotten there, and damn near approached the atmosphere of the 2015 playoff run and the ’16 wild-card game.

There is value in seeing what an engaged fan base is capable of … and, of course, the flip side is that it compounds the depression that set upon Citi this week when the Mets went 0-for-the-Braves and 0-for-the-Cubs.

But of even more value is this: an important core of Mets got to experience what it is to participate in playoff-caliber baseball. Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Steven Matz all experienced that in ’15 and ’16, of course, and so did Michael Conforto, but this was brand new for Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil, for Amed Rosario and J.D. Davis. You’d like to think, if Diaz ever could regain his form, that his struggles in the face of real games will be a long-term benefit.

“They’re getting to experience something that’s unique,” Callaway said, still referring to the playoff chase in the present tense, rather than the past, because what other choice does he have? “You have to go through it, getting deep in the playoffs is something special that they’ll take with them for the rest of their careers. The more practice they get playing games like this the better prepared they’ll be down the road.”

Credit: Source link

The post Despite collapse, Mets did the right thing at trade deadline appeared first on Fox USA Live.

from Fox USA Live https://ift.tt/2ZuEZ8n