Circle of Vultures

St. Louis is just another House of Horrors for the Mets, but then again, that's not saying much, since pretty much every place they go nowadays has become a House of Horrors. But seeing as how what generally happens when the Mets visit St. Louis is that the Cardinals basically circle around the Mets like vultures, pecking away and pecking away until there's nothing left but a corpse. Doesn't matter who's on the team, whether it's been Pujols, or Holliday, or David Eckstein, or Ratso Molina, or Alfred Molina, or Jon Jay, or John Mabry, or John Mabry, Jr., it's usually one of those annoying little "scrappy" guys who does it to the Mets.

It begs the question of why the "scrappy" guys the Cardinals get always seem to come through with clutch hits and heady plays, while the supposedly "scrappy" gamer types the Mets always get end up going the way of Collin Cowgill. But that's another question for another day, because no amount of scrap seems to be able to help the Mets right now.

The silver lining to tonight's game, if such a thing could possibly be had, would be that Shaun Marcum sort of redeemed himself after an embarrassing outing last Friday against Ye Pirates. While the Mets have primarily not hit and been sunk by their awful starting pitching on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday they still didn't hit, but the starting pitching amazingly kept them in the game long enough for Rick Ankiel's 7th inning Home Run to actually tie the game, instead of simply putting a couple of token runs on the board so they lose 7-2 instead of 7-0. Then again, maybe those were just token runs, because the Mets didn't sniff any more runs before or after Ankiel's HR. But I digress. Marcum actually pitched a pretty damn good game tonight, although nobody's going to remember it. It's the kind of outing the Mets have really desperately been counting on him to put forth; only now did he seem to look right enough to get the results. He still looked kind of pissy on the mound, but that may simply be how he is (I am not especially familiar with Marcum's mannerisms. All I knew of him was that he pitched reasonably well while with the Blue Jays and Brewers, had some injury problems and also had kind of a weird, boxy pitching motion). The results were there for him tonight, for the most part, until he kind of ran out of gas in the 7th inning and the bullpen coughed up the losing run on his ledger.

Of course, Marcum's outing was no match for his teammates, who currently appear as though they'd have a tough time facing an A-Ball pitcher right now. Cardinals Wunderkind Shelby Miller didn't appear especially sharp, but any time he got in trouble, the trusty Mets were there to let him off the hook. Yes, the bullpen couldn't hold his lead because Rick Ankiel ran into a fastball, but it was only a matter of pushing another run across and the Mets would be sunk. But, you know, since this is the Cardinals, the game wouldn't be complete without Ratso Molina coming up in the 8th and driving in another run, thereby removing any actual drama from the game. Not that there was much drama to begin with.

The Mets have proven themselves to be so bad it's comical. I actually thought they might be reasonably competitive this season, even if they ultimately ended up losing most of their games, but they're proving themselves to be almost Astros-level bad right now. I just can't imagine, for their own pride, that they'd want to let this happen, but perhaps the stink on the team is just too great.