Hightail it Out Of Here

After Charlie Culberson's 9th inning Home Run sailed over the Center Field fence on Saturday night, capping off another Met Nightmare in Coors Field, nobody would have blamed the Mets for just throwing up their arms and lying down on Sunday, because clearly every time the Mets go to Denver and play the Colorados, it generally results in some sort of ridiculous affair that can only happen in the rarefied air of the Rocky Mountains and ends with the Mets blowing multiple leads and the Colorados ultimately getting that monumental walk-off hit. It goes without saying, but the Mets suffered this sort of indignity in the very first game at Coors Field and it seems like it's happened at least twice in every subsequent trip to Denver the Mets have made.

Saturday's game was, more or less, your typical Coors Field game, where the Mets raced out to a 6-0 lead, before Jenrry Mejia disintegrated in the 5th inning and gave up 8 runs. Things then see-sawed back and forth from there until the Mets, behind Bobby Abreu and his effervescent smile and Juan Lagares and his hit in just the right moment conspired to give the Mets a 10-9 lead. The 10 runs, notably, being the Mets the Mets have scored in a game to date this season. But, alas, Kyle Farnsworth couldn't hold the lead, and somehow you could see that coming. It's what makes games like this that much more frustrating than, say, Friday night's game, where Zack Wheeler just got bludgeoned by the Colorados before he knew what hit him.

Sunday, though, was a different story. Somehow, Dillon Gee would be the one who finally managed to stifle Baseball's Hottest lineup, throwing 6 shutout innings and riding the wave of Lagares, Daniel Murphy and Curtis Granderson to a surprisingly un-Coors Field-like 5-1 Met victory, giving the Mets 1 win in a 4-game series where they seemed destined to get swept right out of town.

I hope, sincerely, that the struggles that Wheeler, Mejia and Bartolo Colon had this week were simply due to the fact that they ran into the Colorados, who right now are The Hot Team. Their lineup of Charlies and Tulowitzkis and guys of a similar nature, all of whom seem to be hitting .340 or higher, have been the talk of the league right now, simply because they've been hitting and scoring runs by the bucketload, and beating up on opponents of any quality. I hope that Mejia, who had a poor outing last weekend against Florida, is just having a slight correction based on an off night and a Colorado start, and come next week, when he faces Philly on Friday night, he'll be back to the same pitcher who was holding down St. Louis and Arizona. The Hot Team can do that to you, make you look foolish for a few days, enough to scare your fan base into thinking that everything's going down the toilet, and then you rebound after you leave town. Well, the Mets next go into Miami, where they had a nice heaping portion of shit stew last season. I don't know if that bodes well. All I know is that the Mets, as usual, couldn't get the hell out of Colorado fast enough, fortunately they don't have to go there again until 2015, and at least they somehow managed to win 1 of the 4 games there. You take what you can get and go from there.