Yeesh...

I know that over the course of a season, every team has "games like that," where nothing seems to go right. But last night for the Mets in Washington was such a ridiculous performance that by the time things ended, the game had dissolved into one of those idiotic farce games that I'm so fond of, replete with the Mets blowing a pair of extra inning leads and ultimately frittering the game away.

This, despite some pitching efforts that bordered on the Heroic.

I sometimes wonder, in the aftermath of games like this, if it wouldn't just be easier if the Mets just faded out and lost the game in normal fashion. It would have been perfectly acceptable to say that Jordan Zimmerman shut the Mets down 3-0, they couldn't figure him out, etc etc. Chris Young came back from his shoulder injury, acquitted himself just fine over his 5 innings, didn't get much help from his defense, and lost.

But, these Mets don't know how to quit. So, they came back on Zimmermann and ultimately took the lead in the 8th inning. It was shades I the last series in Philly. The Mets seemed primed to pull off yet another in a season of improbable comeback victories. But, then, the Mets defense took over and ultimately submarines this effort. The pitchers gave up the hits, yes, but they also made the necessary pitches to get the Nationals out, only to see certain defenders kick, boot and ultimately fumble away a game that they could conceivably have won on three separate occasions.

Not that the bullpen has been especially stellar, and in the end it was Elvin Ramirez contributing to his own undoing when he walked the opposing pitcher in the 12th (in spite of Detwiler basically handing him a strikeout, bunting away a pair of balls way out of the strike zone), but if there was any justice, Bobby Parnell would have gotten a Save and a Purple Heart for the crap he had to endure just to get through the 10th. This is, of course, when the game began to get completely stupid. It was bad enough that Jordany Valdespin, miscast at Shortstop through the machinations of the game, booting an easy grounder to kick off the show. If that wasn't bad enough, Ike Davis followed that up by gagging on an easy DP ball. And a few batters later, Valdespin earned his first Blown Save by yakking on a second grounder that should have been a DP, instead allowing the tying run to score and putting the winning run on 3rd with 1 out. Somehow, Parnell managed to escape from this, probably because he wised up and struck out the next two hitters rather than letting them hit the ball and hoping for the best. If you were keeping score, Parnell essentially got 8 outs in the 10th, but only got credit for 3. Oy vey.

The rest of the game, you already know what happened. And yet somehow Ramirez was a Pitch away from escaping the 12th. Can you imagine what would have happened if this game had continued? I'd guess there would have been another blown lead, probably a ball bouncing off of Vinny Rottino's head, and maybe Kirk Nieuwenhuis coming in to pitch before Danny Espinosa's inevitable walkoff grand slam...oh, wait, that happened 3 years ago. Never mind.

Probably better it ended where it did. Hopefully the Mets got this out of their system.