The Mets are showing heart, guts and resilience in abundance throughout their magical and fun October run.
All that is wonderful. But it looks today like they are no match for one Shohei Ohtani — whose combination of skills is very possibly unmatched in baseball history — or frankly, the Ohtani Dodgers.
Ohtani was alleged here and other places to be in a slump when this National League Championship Series started. But if he was ever truly struggling, that’s quite clearly over now.
Baseball’s 50-50 man looks too good for the Mets, and everyone else. Truly, he’s very likely better than anyone who’s tried playing this game since Alexander Cartwright or Abner Doubleday or whomever started all this. Next year, he could do 50-50-20 (50 homers, 50 steals, 20 wins), and no one would be shocked.
Ohtani’s limited to hitting for now, and that’s enough. He’s hitting homers that look like a “golf ball” (teammate Tommy Edman’s assessment) to parts of Citi Field not often visited. Those momentary Emmanuel Clase/Mariano Rivera comparisons, always silly, thankfully ended now. But the Ohtani/Babe Ruth pairing remains apt.
After putting a bow on the Dodgers’ Game 3 win with a bomb over the right-field foul pole, he set a bad tone by opening Game 4 with a scorcher of home run — 117.8 mph — under the Citi Field bridge in right-center field, leading to a 10-2 Dodgers victory that put them in commanding position in this mega-market NLCS matchup.
If the Mets find themselves in a rather unenviable position, at least it’s a familiar one. This team, all heart, needs a comeback to end all comebacks.
No one should consider these Mets officially dead until the coroner confirms, of course. This is a team that has risen like few others. From 0-5 to start the season and a 22-33 mark in late May, they rose. Time and again, they rose through this late September/October run that has energized all the boroughs.
These Mets are comeback specialists, and they need to engineer their biggest and best one yet against the best competition they have faced. It’s an organization filled with superstars, from the players (Ohtani scored four runs and Mookie Betts had four hits and four RBIs Thursday night) to their part-owner (Magic Johnson) to their legendary pitcher/fan (Sandy Koufax), the last two Hall of Famers among attendees over the past couple days.
But who can predict Mets games these day? They were supposed to be home long ago.
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They showed decent life against Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who signed the biggest pitching contract in MLB history this winter after rejecting a similar Mets offer. Maybe the Mets would have gone higher, but they knew they were beaten by the time the Dodgers matched their $325 million bid and added a $50 million signing bonus.
The Mets put in a big effort there, meeting with Yamamoto in Japan and also hosting him at Steve Cohen’s Connecticut compound. Yamamoto politely called it a “hard decision” in his press conference here Wednesday. But word actually was out before the Mets’ courtship that he preferred to pitch out West, and the Mets understand that now.
No great loss. Yamamoto is vital to the Dodgers now since they need the innings, but he was up and down in his rookie season, he went out for weeks with a shoulder concern, and he hasn’t been exactly dominant since his return.
But while the jury’s out on that $375.6M investment ($325M for Yamamoto, $50.6M for the posting fee), the $700M for Ohtani is an all-time bargain. One estimate suggests that heavily deferred deal actually costs the Dodgers $437.4M, but others assume the team-owning Guggenheim partners can break even if they invest the $680M deferred monies wisely (and they are professional investors).
Realistically, the highest-paid player in baseball history is also the biggest bargain. And there’s nothing for the Mets to regret there, either.
The Mets understood from the start Ohtani had no interest in New York (which is exactly what he flat told the Yankees seven years ago on his tour of teams), and he very likely wasn’t leaving LA, whether that be to stay in Los Angeles of Anaheim or to head to the real LA.
The Mets had no chance there. And if they weren’t the comeback champions, we’d think they have no chance here in this NLCS, too.
They do finally seem ripe to turn into a pumpkin (and not the one Pete Alonso’s been carrying around), and if they hadn’t pulled off multiple magical comebacks already these past few weeks, there’d be no hope at all. They need to win three straight against the league’s best team with the one bullpen that’s working properly this postseason.
Things are looking dire, but they do have the edge with their rotation, better health (all-time tough guy Freddie Freeman had to sit out Game 4 with his bum ankle) and their recent happy history.
They are going to have to figure out a way to solve Ohtani, however. The Mets have a big heart and some very nice All-Star caliber players. But this is a guy who comps to Ruth and a guy who is playing like Ruth in October now.
