Bump in the road

Morning Dose: Wednesday, June 18

☀️ GOOD MORNING:

Bad losses happen in baseball. As fans, newsletter writers, we add extra meaning to them, as we do to wins. In prep of this series in Atlanta, I wrote yesterday:

The Mets pulled off one of the most dramatic regular-season victories in franchise history, an event that felt less like a game and more like an exorcism. The Atlanta ghosts perhaps not fully vanquished, but captured in an abandoned New York firehouse, or whatever dark place the baseball gods reserve for scattered demons.

Ghostbuster fans remember the scene in the first movie when Walter Peck, the EPA inspector (who clearly wasn’t Abundance pilled), shutdown the ghost containment unit, releasing the ghouls back into the city.

To Mets fans, it felt like that happened last night in Atlanta.

In perspective, it was a bad loss — but again, bad losses happen in baseball. They happen to the Dodgers, many times. They happen to the Yankees, many times. They happened to the ‘86 Mets.

What makes us tune in every night is the roller coaster. You can’t have the ups, without the downs. I’ve warned everyone this isn’t a 100+ win team. Over the first few months of the season, there have been too many ups and not enough downs relative to the talent on the roster, particularly in the rotation and bottom of the order.

The Amazins are still really good. The season could still end with champagne. But there will be bumps along the way. We’ve reached our first of the 2025 season, four straight losses.

On a day another starting pitcher landed on the IL, the Mets dropped a heartbreaker to Atlanta, a theme far too familiar. The Braves have won 24 of their past 34 meetings against New York, dating back to 2022, or even during the years things have been different under Steve Cohen. Atlanta has won the season series every year since 2018, and will try to repeat that trend again to pull them out of mediocrity in a season they had lost 10 straight one-run games until last night.

☕️ Grab your coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!

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Box Score | Full Standings

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🎢 GOING DOWN

We might as start with the eighth inning when everything started to go wrong. David Peterson, on the mound hours after the team learned they would be without Tylor Megill for four-to-five weeks, was acting like an ace, pitching past the seventh inning for his second straight start. With a 4-1 lead, the game felt over.

The door opened a crack for Atlanta when Carlos Mendoza, perhaps trusting what he saw from Peterson’s recent complete game shutout, didn’t have anyone warming in the bullpen. That meant when his starter got into immediate trouble by walking the nine hitter, Reed Garrett had to jump up and get ready quickly.

Garrett has enacted miracles out of the bullpen, so why not act like Clark Kent, quickly turning into Superman with the turn of his body in the bullpen and swooping in to help his team escape an impossible jam — the bases loaded with nobody out when his name was called.

He almost did it, striking out Matt Olson on a splitter that caught the edge of the zone and getting Austin Riley to fly out. He was one strike away from completing the miracle when Marcell Ozuna roped a bases-clearing double down the left-field line on a pitch Garrett originally didn’t want to throw.