It took about 15 minutes for the Mets to reveal themselves as a one-trick pony this year. Every fifth day you could sit in front of a television, or make the trek out to Citi Field, and you knew your faith would be justified because Jacob deGrom would grab a baseball and he would do all manner of wondrous things once it was in his fingertips.
One day out of five, the Mets didn’t make you sick.
Now we have the Giants, who have preached for decades that they are substance over style, that they are a collective over the individual, that they are about toughness and tenacity and team, about grinding and grit and guts. But who, in this lousy autumn of 2018, have become the football bookend of the Mets:
Every fifth or so time that he touches the ball, Saquon Barkley does something so remarkable, so irresistible, so indescribable that it makes otherwise reasonable people shout nonsensically at a television screen in their den, or jump involuntarily to their feet in the grandstands at MetLife Stadium.
One play out of five, the Giants don’t make you sick.
So if you look at it that way, it could actually be worse for the Giants, who fell to 1-5 with a disgraceful 34-13 no-show against the Eagles. There was actually a hopeful buzz surrounding this game since the NFC East looks substantially weaker, top to bottom, than the SEC West. The Giants entered 1-4 yet only a game and a half out of first place.
They left 1-5 with the buzz silenced, with the 77,167 (save for the 10,000 or so Eagles fans) booing their every move, with a quarterback bearing the permanent look of one of the kids in the old “Scream” movies, with a scarlet letter attached to their throwback-1986 uniforms.
“S,” for stink.
“S,” for soft.
“S,” for sick.
“We didn’t do anything well enough to win,” Giants coach Pat Shurmur said. “We have to go back to the drawing board and try to clean things up.”
Baseball season in New York officially died Tuesday night, a few minutes before midnight. Football season on the Blue half of town died less than 48 hours later, as Carson Wentz filleted the Giants’ defense, as Eli Manning kept looking for the 15 or 16 Eagles defenders who seemed to be coming after him on every down.
“Not where we want to be,” Eli Manning said. “We have to play better football.”
Yes. It is enough to make you sick. It is enough to make you look up what the old Detroit Lions looked like when they had a team built for 10 years the way the Giants have crafted this one, with one electric runner (Barry Sanders) and an otherwise pedestrian — or worse — supporting cast. The numbers for those 10 years in Motown:
78 wins, 82 losses. That’s essentially an 8-8 average.
And 15,269 yards rushing for Sanders. That’s an average of 99.79 yards per game. Maybe that’s worth the price of admission when you haven’t won an NFL championship since 1957 and you’ve won exactly one playoff game in the 61 years since.
That’s not what the Giants are supposed to be about.
But that’s what the Giants are about now, and for the foreseeable future. They have a loose-cannon $95 million wide receiver who hasn’t been worth a fraction of the headache so far. They have a 37-year-old quarterback bound for the Hall of Fame in about 10 years, but earmarked for the ER if he keeps getting pounded to a pulp week after week.
They have a defense that, despite last year’s slapstick, was still believed to be stout enough to cause damage but has turned out to be pliable as a pile of pillows.
And they have Barkley.
And every once in awhile, he is almost enough to make you forget the rest. There was a 50-yard scoring run Thursday night, and a 46-yarder, and a screen pass that he turned into a 55-yard gain (which allowed Manning’s passing totals to not be nearly the anemic pap they should have been).
Mets fans know: once a week, sometimes twice, deGrom was almost enough to make you forget Yoenis Cespedes’ heels and Noah Syndergaard’s finger and Mickey Callaway’s goofiness and a pathetic, punchless batting order.
“Almost” being the key word there.
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