Sleepy Time

I can't vouch for what the weather was like on Wednesday night in Chicago. If it felt as oppressively humid as it did in New York (where my living room felt like something out of the movie "Smoke"), then the 3 hour, 40 minute mess of a game that the Miserable Cubs and the Lifeless Mets waged probably would have made a little more sense. In yet another rhythmless game that saw the Mets get runners on base repeatedly and fail to drive them in, and in a game where they got yet another Home Run out of Ruben Tejada of all people, the Mets in general decided to stick their thumbs in their asses and let the Cubs rally back and take a lead in the 5th inning. By this time, it seems that the general length of the game had made them tired, so Terry Collins' team strategy for the last 4 innings of the game was apparently for the entire team to take a nap. So, they did, and the result was their second consecutive 1-run loss to one of the worst teams in Baseball. God Bless.

The warning signs for a long game were evident before the first pitch, since the pitching matchup pitted Daisuke Matsuzaka, who's known for slowing down to a crawl if that's the kind of vibe he's feeling, against the Cubs' Edwin Jackson, who once famously threw a 147-pitch No Hitter and can often be likened to watching paint dry on the mound. Jackson threw about 66 pitches in the first two innings while his teammates kicked the ball around and allowed a few Mets to score, which was nice, except that the game was already over an hour old. Starlin Castro, the Cubs Jose Offerman-like Shortstop, made one of his trademark egregious errors and Jackson just as egregiously allowed a 2-run double to Lucas Duda and the Mets were on their way. Tejada homered in the 4th and things seemed fine.

Then Matsuzaka came unglued in the 5th, which became one of those innings where you want to just turn off the TV and run and hide. We've been through it far too many times with far too many pitchers, one of those innings where the opponent gets a bunch of walks, and some scratch hits, and then there's a 2-run single and a few pitching changes, and all of a sudden there's guys like Dana Eveland pitching for the Mets, and there's another pitching change and Jeurys Familia is wild-pitching home the lead run for the Cubs...

...And you know the rest. The Mets never recover. A succession of 6 Cubs Relievers, many of whom you never heard of or never wanted to hear of managed to allow the Mets 2 hits for the rest of the game, giving more credence to my theory that they were just too tired to finish the game after that mess of an inning. There's no other reason I can think of that they couldn't manage to cobble together at least one run in that period of time. So, now they've lost this series and can only hope to salvage the final game tonight, if they feel like waking up.