Cesar Perdomo Gave Us Six Shutout Innings and the Eighth Took It Away

A kid making his second big league appearance shut out the Mets into the seventh, Jung Hoo Lee drove in both runs, and then it was gone in about the time it takes to reheat a cup of coffee. Mets 4, Giants 2.

I had it. For about ninety minutes on a Sunday morning I actually had it, and I was dumb enough to let myself enjoy it.

First pitch was 10:40 out here. I was standing at the counter with the tablet leaned up against the toaster, cutting a cantaloupe nobody in this house wanted, and by the time I sat down Cesar Perdomo had put up two clean innings against Soto and Lindor and I thought, hang on, who is this.

Who is Cesar Perdomo and why has nobody told me about him

Six innings. Three hits. One walk, four strikeouts, nothing across.

That's the second time this man has appeared in a major league game. He's thrown ten innings in his life up here with one earned run on the ledger, a 0.90 ERA, and a total of maybe fourteen people in Northern California who could pick him out of a lineup.

He wasn't blowing anybody away either. He kept putting the ball where it needed to go and letting a lineup full of guys who make eight figures roll over on it. Juan Soto came up three times, took a walk, and did nothing else all day.

I won't sit here and tell you a kid with ten big league innings is the answer to anything. I've been burned by every version of that sentence since about 2018. But I've watched this rotation get hammered so many times this summer that six shutout innings in Queens felt like somebody opened a window in a hot room, and I'm allowed to like it for one morning.

The fourth, and Jung Hoo Lee again

Eldridge singles. Cox singles. Christian Scott had been carving us up to that point, seven strikeouts in under five innings, and then Lee gets one he can handle and shoots it into right field and both of them come around.

Two nothing.

That was the offense. The other nine guys who came to the plate combined for three hits and a lot of walking back to the dugout.

Lee's at .280 with 53 driven in, and he has quietly been the most watchable position player on this roster since May. I think that would get talked about more if anybody outside the 415 were still watching Giants games in September. Bryce Eldridge is up to 15 homers with an .806 OPS in 98 games as a rookie first baseman, which is a real thing to build on, and he was one of the two who scored.

That was the whole ballgame, though. Two runs on one swing. When your entire day is one swing you're asking the bullpen to be perfect, and we do not have that bullpen. We have not had that bullpen since April.

The eighth inning

Kuhnel gets through the seventh clean.

Six outs to go. I'm doing the breakfast dishes with the tablet propped up on the windowsill thinking about how nice it would be to spend a Sunday afternoon not annoyed.

Carson Seymour comes in. Brett Baty hits the second pitch of the inning into the left field seats. One run game, and I put the sponge down.

Ewing singles. Soto walks. And Bo Bichette hits a three run shot to left center and the whole thing is finished. Four batters. No outs recorded. Four runs. I stood in my own kitchen with a wet plate in my hand and said absolutely nothing, which my family will tell you is the loudest I get.

Seymour's ERA is 5.79. Eleven walks in 23 and a third innings. He's been handed the eighth inning of one lost game after another all summer because there is nobody else to hand it to, and I understand the reasoning, I really do, this is what September is for on a team like ours. It still took a genuinely good morning away from me and I would like to lodge that somewhere.

Twelve strikeouts, and I want to talk about that too

Drew Gilbert, 0 for 4 with three punchouts. Osleivis Basabe, 0 for 4 with three punchouts. Rafael Devers, 1 for 4 with three, which stings a little extra after what he did to these same Mets a day earlier.

Twelve for the game, five hits total, and we did not put a run on the board after the fourth. Kodai Senga threw the ninth for a save in a game his team led by two runs, which tells you how seriously anybody takes this lineup right now.

59 and 85. Eighteen games left. The math has been dead for weeks and the math dying is not the part that gets me, because I made my peace with this season around the All Star break the same as everyone else did.

What gets me is that we keep inventing new ways to lose the ones we already won. A guy nobody's heard of hands you six zeroes on the road in a hostile park and you cannot get it to the ninth inning. Do you know how few of those we get handed?

Cincinnati next. I'll be at the counter, tablet against the toaster, pretending I'm doing something else.

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