These New Guys

When you come away from a game and the best thought you can have is, "well, at least the game was quick," it's pretty easy to infer that the game did not go especially well for the Mets.

Though Rafael Montero, the first of two consecutive nights of Met-Starting-Pitching-Prospect-Making-Their-Major-League-Debut, didn't fare poorly, allowing 3 runs in his 6 innings of work, he and his Mets teammates were buzzsawed by the hot import Masahiro Tanaka. Tanaka mastered the Mets for the duration, ending the Mets 6-game Subway Series win streak with a 4-hit shutout. It was probably to his advantage that Tanaka caught the Mets at Citi Field, where they can't hit. After a pair of games in the Bronx where the Mets lit everything on fire, they went home and went right back in the tank, like clockwork.

But enough about the offense, we can focus instead on Montero's debut, which was somewhat long-awaited, given the hype and the fact that the pitching staff needed a jolt. Jenrry Mejia was shifted to the bullpen in favor of Montero, which I suppose made sense given that Mejia was the low man in the Mets rotation as far as seniority and the fact that he'd struggled in his past few starts. I wasn't particularly a fan of the move, seeing as how Mejia has what you might say is higher upside than someone else in the rotation, but, whatever. The pitching staff was littered with names like Lannan and Germen and Farnsworth, guys that didn't inspire much of anything while people like Montero and Jacob deGrom sat around riding the bus, but that's now changed, and Montero is here and he got thrown right into the rotation in the Subway Series of all things. If that's not enough, deGrom is going to start Thursday night in his Major League debut. deGrom, who not only gives the Mets a monopoly on the guys whose last names start with a lower case "d," was going to sit the bullpen but for the mysterious lat injury to Dillon Gee (talk about things that couldn't happen at a worse time) that I seem to have missed completely.

This may not work out well in the short term, and it didn't result in a win tonight, but these are moves in the right direction. If the prospects are here and the team is just going to be sort of middling all season long, let them be middling while seeing what some of these guys can do. Montero came out tonight and pitched fine for someone making his Major League debut. Not everybody can come up and be like Matt Harvey or, heaven forbid, Collin McHugh, so 3 runs on 5 hits in 6 innings is a fine job. Hopefully deGrom does as well tomorrow and comes away with a win in the process.