If you watched the Mets on Wednesday night, you watched a team find new and creative ways to lose a baseball game. The infield was standing in the wrong spots, Mark Vientos was getting roasted at first, and Tyrone Taylor's name was once again cropping up in the loss column. NjTank99 was on the timeline doing what he does best when the Mets are bad, which is type with both fists.
The Tyrone Taylor frustration boiled over in real time.
Have the Mets won a game that Tyrone Taylor started he is beyond trash
But the actual main character of the night ended up wearing a mask behind the plate. Junior Valentine had one of those games where every borderline call seemed to tilt one way, and the ABS challenge system somehow made it worse instead of better. The Mets blew their challenges, the strike zone was a mystery box, and the whole thing devolved into the kind of umpiring discourse that gets a guy mentioned in the same breath as the all-time villains.
Valentine got slotted into the Mount Rushmore of bad umps.
Junior Valentine went to the Joe West, CB Bucknor and Angel Hernandez school of umprining
The lowlight of the Valentine night was a moment where he apparently decided Brett Baty wanted to challenge a call. Baty, by all available video evidence, did not want to challenge anything. He was just standing there. That did not stop the wheels from turning, and the clip is the kind of thing that lives on the internet forever once it gets out.
The phantom Baty challenge, in full.
From there it was open season. JohnRichTV cracked that we are inching toward video review for whether a batter's hand grazed his own helmet, which feels less like a joke and more like a roadmap for where this challenge system is heading. Meanwhile the positioning gripes kept piling up, because of course they did.
The shift complaints are now a nightly Mets tradition.
The Mets fielding positioning is always fucked up
By the end of the night TheClemReport had the only solution that made any sense, which is to put the entire roster on the IL and see if Rob Manfred even notices. When the ump is the talking point, the first baseman is a punching bag, and the challenge system is eating itself, you are not really running a baseball operation anymore. You are running a content farm. Mets fans, as always, are the ones doing the harvesting.