It’s Opening Week around Major League Baseball and everyone is excited. But remember, the Mets are going to lose.
Maybe not today or tomorrow, but they will lose – probably between 65 and 74 times this season.
They will also win of course, most likely between 88 and 97 times.
There will be winning streaks and there will be losing streaks. Players will get red hot, and of course, ice cold.
The Mets will come back in a game where they are down a bunch of runs, and of course, will blow big leads too. The bullpen will blow saves, give up runs, and infielders and outfielders will make costly errors.
Players will make bad decisions, they will fail to get down sacrifice bunts, they won’t get the runner in from third with less than two outs, and they will hit into rally-killing double plays.
Pitchers you have never heard of will throw shutouts, while our top pitchers like Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey will have outings where they simply “don’t have it”.
Players will get injured, they will have setbacks, and of course,Terry Collins will make head-scratching decisions.
The Mets will lose series to below .500 teams, they will have losing road trips and losing home-stands.
Umpires will make bad calls, and of course, we will have to wait and wait for replay for challenges to go against us.
Pitchers will have pitch counts and come out of games earlier than you might want, or later of course.
So when all that happens, try to stay calm. Try to remember: Baseball isn’t football. You don’t lace them up 16 times a year once a week it is 162 games, and possibly 19 more if you take the World Series to Game 7.
As the old adage goes, it is a marathon not a sprint.
So as exciting as the season’s beginning is, 1-0 doesn’t mean the World Series and 0-1 isn’t the end of the world.
So stay off the ledge. The sky isn’t always falling. An 0-for-4 doesn’t mean a guy can’t play, and three opening day homeruns off Doc Gooden doesn’t make you a Hall of Famer – Tuffy Rhodes.
When a guy is removed from a game, he isn’t necessarily going to be out for the season. So again, stay even, stay sane, enjoy the long (long) ride.
We are strapped in for 6-7 months, there will be a baseball game between some two teams to watch every night between today and the first quarter of the NFL schedule. One game is meaningful, but doesn’t have much meaning on its own – even if it is the hallowed Opening Day.
