Mets Issues: Rat or Raccoon? ZZ Top Imitator?

New Mets hero named Mazeika looks like ZZTop

So many questions from Friday night's Mets game.
Who was that guy wearing No.76 who plunked a 35-foot dribbler to win the game?
Back in the day, they used to talk about banjo hitters. This guy could be a guitar hitter.
And Patrick Mazeika's moment of glory came on the very same week that a hoax was circulating that ZZ Top's guitarist , Bill Gibbons, was rumored to have died in a car crash. Total hoax. 

Speaking of hoaxes, something happened in the runway behind the Mets' dugout Friday night. 
Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil, who had just botched a possible double play were the source of the commotion -- other Mets running down the steps to investigate something.

No problem, the lads assured reporters in the antiseptic pandemic press conference after the game. (No more sidling up to trusted sources in a crowded post-game clubhouse. Something precious has been lost in coverage of baseball and other sports. I always had a player or three in any clubhouse who would clarify stuff for me, quietly. Not gossip, usually....but a different perspective. Even for papers that cover clubs regularly, access is going, going....)
 
No fight, claimed Lindor, who had just crushed a game-tying homer in a season of grinding frustration. He and McNeil had been discussing, in raucous decibels, whether the giant beast they had both sighted was either a New York rat or a New York raccoon? Or was it a possum? Or one of our alligators from the marsh not far below the Mets' playground?

Basic New York street rat

Garbage pail raccoon

Nice try, boys. We New Yorkers can tell the difference, and so, I am sure, can you both.
Please coordinate your stories, and while you are at it, please coordinate your footwork around second base.

I can understand why Mets might be edgy these days. A few days ago, the Mets fired Chili Davis, a well-respected batting coach. (Reminds me of when the Mets fired my friend Bill Robinson to send a message to whom? the manager? the players?) Cheesy, either way, but Davis' firing highlighted the current make-it-up era.  It didn't seem to dawn on the new owner, Steve Cohen, that fans will suss out the scapegoating of Davis. I guess that's how it goes in the hedge fund game. Now the Mets are being "run" by people who were second or third choices. No wonder tempers are fraught.

Plus, the domination by anonymous types in some underground bunker, running statistics through a computer. One result is defensive shifts, changing pitch by pitch, from hieroglyphics placed by the  Analytics Crowd on plastic crib sheets, stuck in hip pockets, are confusing fielders. 
Next time the mad analytics types are preparing their instructions for players who must react, in split seconds, to baseballs spinning in play, perhaps they could include photos to differentiate between rats (left) and raccoons (right.) 
Meantime, fielders still have to deal with baseballs wriggling in play, put there by some new Met who looks like a ZZ Top musician. The human touch. That's our Mets.