FLUSHING, N.Y. — To be honest, I wanted to see Corbin Carroll and Juan Soto have a game. I was faintly aware of the Arizona Diamondbacks bravely holding up the rear of the competitive teams in the NL West (four of them!), but during an obligatory pregame database check, I learned that Carroll was having an obscene start. Per FanGraphs, he has been the second-best position player this season; per a cursory glance at Baseball Savant sliders, he had pivoted from a hitting profile traditional to players primarily described as "fast"—above-average plate discipline that'll get a guy on base well enough—to a faster swing and strikeout-happier approach that could—could!—mean he's now a bona fide slugger who also happens to be extremely fast. Meanwhile for Soto, it was a bit simpler: Surely he was due a game at this point.
In the way these things usually go, I got neither. Carroll went 0-for-4. Soto, despite two smoked line drives into the outfield, went 0-for-3 with a walk. The game itself carried little tension. In spite of David Roth doomposting in Slack about the post-blog Mets being struck down by possible season-ending surgery and a stomach bug, the lineup smacked around Diamondbacks starter Eduardo Rodríguez in the third and fourth inning to rack up a near-unlosable 7–0 lead. At that point, for the underprepared game-goer trembling in the Citi Field 500-level like a chihuahua that more closely resembles a stick insect than a dog, the only rooting interests were for some highlights to get pumped up about, and a kind ending time with respect to the NJ Transit train schedule.
A home run, as far as highlights go, is fine. It can be great, when a game is close, but when a team's really laying into a pitcher, it's just a bit of extra seasoning. Three home runs to the same spot in left field is notable enough to be fun, but is still just fine once a team is already up 7–0. (Also, thanks to one of Citi Field's more busted sight-lines, we couldn't see most of them.) What really does it for a crowd is a defensive highlight, which carries the theoretical space of a possible rally cut short, and in turn feeds into the sensation that a team just can't go wrong. And the only thing better than a defensive highlight is three defensive highlights that turn a four-minute inning into a mini-reel in its own right.
None of these individual plays quite match up to Daulton Varsho's unbelievable catch in Tuesday night's Red Sox–Blue Jays game, which epitomizes the defensive highlight: a good play made better by a mistake, or a player who isn't quite good enough to make it look routine. Get both of those involved, and you have a play that you have to replay at least twice. The contradiction of defensive baseball is that the great players make highlights disappear. The initial jump is too good, and a difficult catch turns into an easy play; an impossible catch turns into a near-miss. Does it matter, in the end, that Varsho's play had a 99-percent catch probability? Perhaps for scouts or armchair analysts, but for the spectator? Not at all, nor should it.
Back to the Mets. Twenty years later, if you take up the sum of Pete Crow-Armstrong and Tyrone Taylor's center-field careers, you will find at least one order of magnitude more catches better than the one Taylor made in the top of the fourth inning on Tuesday night, a sprint to his right culminating in an all-out, hat-losing dive. But Taylor's catch came just after third baseman Mark Vientos accidentally deflected a hard Randal Grichuk grounder toward Francisco Lindor, who then whipped it across the diamond to Pete Alonso for your classic 5-6-3 putout; another one of those minor mistakes–turned–highlights, with a caveat that it was impressive Vientos got to that ball at all. And it preceded Lindor, one of the great defensive shortstops in baseball, snagging an absolutely smoked Eugenio Suárez ground ball on one hop and throwing him out easily at first. Take the sum of all three plays, and that—not the three runs scored in the bottom of the third to make it 7–0, or the Alonso homer in the bottom of the fourth to run the margin to eight—was the half-inning that sealed the game.
Every Mets game before Soto starts hitting will come with the caveat of "Now imagine what this team will look like once Juan Soto starts hitting." Well, I'm imagining it, and unfortunately, while it's not a future I would personally enjoy, it's a future that is slowly revealing itself game after game. Meanwhile, this game ended at approximately 9:40 p.m. After a 40-or-so-minute ride on the 7, and an easy transfer onto the 2, we arrived at Penn Station with 15 minutes to spare. The train left on time and ultimately arrived at the destination station a few minutes early. NJ Transit? Arriving early? I've never heard of such a thing! I can't wait for my well-functioning transit system to safely bring me to the World Cup in 2026.
Oh, also: Tyrone Taylor's catch had a 40-percent catch probability, per Statcast. Not shabby at all, but also not in the realm of impossibility. But that only matters if you care. I assure you that in the moment, nobody did.
