Last One, Best One

The last game of a baseball season comes with an unavoidable bit of accounting. There is a final score, a final record, a last set of numbers that gets filed away and eventually becomes the official version of what happened. On Sunday afternoon, the Somerset Patriots, playing one more time as the Jersey Diners, lost their regular-season finale to the Hartford Yard Goats, 5-3. Somerset finished 74-64, its best regular-season record since 2024.

That is the record but is not the whole story.

For the first three innings, part of this dispatch was written from the Diners booth on the concourse, which is about as appropriate a place as possible to watch a Jersey Diners game. The view was terrific. The company was better. All six grandkids were at the ballpark with me, and for a few innings we had what felt like the best seats in the house. 

The game itself gave everybody plenty to watch. Somerset and Hartford stayed close enough that the afternoon never settled into ceremonial-final-game mode. Hartford finished with 10 hits to Somerset's eight, while the Patriots left nine runners on base. Somerset starter Michael Arias worked 2 2/3 scoreless innings, allowing one hit and striking out three, extending his scoreless streak to 12 innings to finish the regular season. Jace Avina had two hits and reached base three times, while Roderick Arias went 2-for-5, drove in two runs and stole his career-high 38th base of the year.

Hartford also supplied one of those small baseball plays that looks even better from the stands than it does in a box score: a beautifully executed bunt. Baseball has spent years becoming louder, harder and more measurable, so there is still something satisfying about watching a hitter deaden a ball into exactly the right patch of grass and make the defense solve the problem in real time. It was simply good baseball, and on the last day of the regular season it deserved to be appreciated even when the other team did it.

The umpiring provided a different form of entertainment. There were a few calls that the home crowd found, to put it diplomatically, dubious. One in particular produced a proper brouhaha and enough sustained booing to establish the afternoon's second competition: baseball on the field, disapproval from the seats.

One of the grandkids understood the assignment immediately because once the booing started, he apparently concluded that this was now his role in the proceedings. He booed for the rest of the game. Not strategically. Not necessarily in response to anything. Just booing because booing had become part of going to baseball. The commitment survived trips away from the seats and eventually followed him into the bathroom, where an unexpected child's boo echoing through the facilities managed to get laughs from people who had no idea how long this particular protest movement had already been underway.

That may be the most accurate description of how baseball gets handed down. Nobody sits a kid down and explains the complete ritual. They pick it up by watching everyone else. You stand when everybody stands. You clap when something good happens. You learn that a foul ball is suddenly the most important object in the world. And apparently, if several thousand people inform an umpire that they disagree with his professional judgment, you may reasonably conclude that booing is simply one of the services provided by the ballpark.

Hartford carried a 4-3 lead into the ninth and added insurance when Jared Thomas hit a solo home run. Somerset still had last licks, because baseball is considerate enough to make you use every last out before it lets the season end, but there would be no final comeback. The Yard Goats won 5-3. The Patriots finished the afternoon with a loss, the series with four wins in six games, and the regular season at 74-64.

The official postgame notes will remember the useful things. Avina's 29th multi-hit game. Roderick Arias' career-high stolen-base total. Josh Moylan finishing on an 11-game on-base streak. Chris Veach adding two more scoreless innings. Eleven Somerset strikeouts. An attendance of 4,910 and a game that lasted two hours and 34 minutes.

Those things matter and they are why there is a box score.

But there should probably be another column somewhere for the things the box score cannot hold: three innings in the Diners booth, six grandkids at the park, a bunt worth admiring, a call worth arguing about, and one very committed young heckler discovering that booing is portable.

The Patriots did not win the last one, but it was still the best one.

SOURCE NOTES

• Somerset Patriots — “Arias Bashes Multiple Hits in Regular Season Finale,” Sept. 13, 2026
• Hartford Yard Goats — “Yard Goats Win Regular Season Finale; Playoffs Next,” Sept. 13, 2026