The Mets Lose in Extra Innings and the World Somehow Keeps Spinning: A Dispatch from the Bleachers of Geopolitical Disappointment

Flushing, Queens—Tuesday night—where the Mets are busy losing in extra innings while the rest of the planet pretends to be asleep. Somewhere above Citi Field, a Lufthansa A-350 banks toward Frankfurt, its passengers blissfully unaware that their 401(k)s are now being piloted by a rookie relief pitcher who just walked the bases loaded. In the grand scheme of things, this 6-4 defeat to the Braves is only slightly less consequential than the collapse of the yen, which is fortunate, because the yen is also collapsing.

From the press box you can almost see the curvature of the Earth—or perhaps that’s just the hangover from the press-box Chardonnay. Either way, the Mets have become a sort of geopolitical Rorschach test: the Japanese fans in Section 134 see Kodai Senga’s ghost-forkball as proof of techno-Oriental superiority; the Venezuelan family in Section 12 interpret Francisco Lindor’s slump as a parable on the perils of dollar-denominated contracts back home; and the British stag party in neon “KING OF QUEENS” sashes simply wonders why no one here drinks warm lager. Everyone projects onto the Mets because the Mets are, at their core, an international safe space for disappointment.

Consider the supply chain. That maple bat Pete Alonso just splintered against the right-field foul pole? Canadian maple, shipped through the Port of New York on a Maltese-flagged freighter crewed by Filipinos, insured by a syndicate in London, and financed with bonds held by a sovereign-wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. When the barrel corkscrews into the stands, it takes a sliver of the global economy with it. One shattered bat, one fractured illusion that anything is still made anywhere, by anyone, for a single nation-state.

Meanwhile, the broadcast feed ricochets off a satellite parked somewhere over the equator, beaming this particular tragedy to U.S. military bases in Ramstein, to expat bars in Ho Chi Minh City, to a data center in Dublin that resells it as NFT highlights to crypto traders in Singapore who will never watch a single frame. The game is everywhere, which means it is nowhere, which is probably how the Mets’ middle-relief corps feels when they jog in from the bullpen.

Back in the seventh inning, the stadium DJ cued up “Ca Plane Pour Moi” because irony is the only export America still leads the world in. A French tourist turns to me and shrugs: “In Paris we riot when the government raises the retirement age by two years. Here you pay $17 for a beer and applaud a ground-ball out.” He has a point; the Mets are essentially a pension fund that occasionally plays baseball. Steve Cohen’s hedge-fund clients in Greenwich expect 8 percent annual returns; Mets fans would settle for a clean relay throw.

And yet, the game keeps lurching forward like a UN climate summit—high hopes, procedural delays, and a final communiqué nobody believes. In the tenth, the automatic-runner-on-second rule (brought in during the pandemic to spare us extra-inning exposure to our own mortality) triggers a small diplomatic incident. A visiting Japanese beat writer asks if this is “socialist baseball.” I tell him it’s more like quantitative easing: you manufacture a runner out of thin air and hope inflation doesn’t eat your lead.

By the time the Braves plate two in the 11th, the crowd’s energy has been offshored to whatever emotional call center handles Mets grief. A lone heckler yells, “Bring back deGrom!” which translates, in any language, as “Bring back the illusion of competence.” The final out is recorded at 11:47 p.m. EDT, which is 11:47 a.m. in Singapore, where a day trader liquidates his position in DraftKings stock because he misread the box score. Somewhere, a butterfly flaps its wings; here, a slider hangs.

The stadium empties into the 7 train, that rattling steel metaphor for late capitalism. Fans clutch Shake Shack bags like surrender flags. Tomorrow there will be another game, another doomed ninth-inning rally, another chance to pretend the world isn’t burning outside the turnstiles. The Mets will lose again, probably, but in doing so they’ll knit together an accidental community of the globally disenchanted. You can’t buy that on Alibaba—yet.