Baffler Meal

How the Mets continue to win games like this in the fashion that they do just baffles me. But in a good way, y'know?

After a Monday win in which they caught a break by Sheets coming out of the game and a late rally, the Mets win on Tuesday after Jonathon Niese looked like a nervous, overwhelmed, 21-year old kid making his Major League debut against a team with a penchant for eating left handed pitching for lunch.

So, it would be up to the much-maligned Bullpen to carry the game out from the 4th inning forward. If the Mets had blown the game, it wouldn't have been surprising. It would have been incredibly frustrating, but not surprising.

So, the Mets bullpen goes out and throws 7 shutout innings. Of course they do.

So the Mets bounce back after Niese couldn't hold a 5-1 lead, maintain the tie into extra innings, and win on the merits of Daniel Murphy and Endy Chavez.

So, the Mets win the first two games—and the Series—in Milwaukee, a team that had been playing even better baseball then they had themselves of late.

So the Mets stand 5-2 on this current road trip, ending this afternoon, that served as one more murderous stretch in a season that seems to have presented the Mets with nothing but murderous stretches.

On WFAN, yesterday afternoon, Mike Francesa (solo, and believe me it's difficult to adjust to now saying "The Big Guy" instead of "The Big Guy and The Little Fella") proclaimed that the Yankees were done, their season was over, and after he spent the better part of 2 hours trashing them, he said that this is the Mets city now, for as long as they can hang on to it. In his speech, given in typical Francesa pompous tone, Mike handed the keys to the City to Mets fan Bob Heussler, and told him that it was his town, and his time will be brief. It will be a wild ride and a wild September, especially with that bullpen. Good luck.

Whatever anyone chooses to take from it, it makes a lot of sense. Two days into September, and it's already a wild ride. The whole season has been a wild ride. Especially after the way the team played last year, and after the way 2006 played out, it's very, very easy to treat every loss as the beginning of the end. And it seems like we, as Mets fans, have done that all year long. And early this season, as the team continued to play in uninspiring fashion, and losses mounted, how could we not but want to give up, throw the team and the season in the toilet, and come back next year. But this switch has flipped. Now, the team wins. Losses are still met with fear and loathing. But these losses are coming fewer and farther between. September will and almost always is a wild ride. But something tells me this year is going to play out in a vastly different fashion from last year.