Daily Rewind

The Mets stomped the Phillies on Wednesday afternoon 11-2 in an afternoon affair that was, as usual, at a rumor level for me since I was at work while it was happening. The 12pm start time for games is odd enough to begin with. I can't imagine what it must be like to be at one. On the one hand, it can't be much different from the classic 1:10pm game, but those are the kinds of games you can get used to. Plus, the only time I really ever go to a 1:10pm game is on Opening Day, or the rare afternoon on a weekend where I have nothing particularly better to do with myself. 12:10pm seems too close to to being prior to noon, and therefore being a morning start time. That only works if you're in Boston and it's Patriots' Day.

Fortunately, SNY does a wonderful thing and replays pretty much every afternoon game at around 7 or 7:30pm and sometimes truncates it so that I'm able to have some idea of what happened during the game. It also confounds Mrs. Mets2Moon quite a bit; she just assumes that I'm watching the game until it gets to be late and she wonders why the sun is still out in Queens. Lately, she has wised up and started asking me "Is it live?" when she gets home just to make sure.

This afternoon's affair, which I saw in the evening, consisted of Zack Wheeler continuing his string of fine outings, a happily recycled comment. Wheeler worked himself into the 7th in spite of not necessarily having his best stuff, and only allowed two runs. Fortunately, Wheeler was the beneficiary of an opposite field 3-run Home Run by Daniel Murphy in the 5th inning, which served to give the Mets the lead and more or less break the game open in one of those moments that could end up being replayed forever depending on how things break out. If nothing else, it's certainly a moment that makes a season in review program on SNY when you talk about key hits by Daniel Murphy.

Murphy's Home Run off of Kyle Kendrick—pitching against the Mets for the 237th time in his illustrious career—set the stage for more fireworks later in the game, among them a merry-go-round 7th inning rally that produced five runs on five separate RBI hits, the last one produced by Jeurys Familia of all people, who doesn't appear at bat often but apparently has acquitted himself well enough since he's now 2 for 3 lifetime with an RBI—better than a large number of regulars in Mets history—and one inning later the scoring was capped by a monster Home Run by Lucas Duda in the 8th inning, which much to everyone's delight has become a near-daily occurrence.

The win gave the Mets a series win over the Phillies, which is something they should be doing these days. The Phillies are old, creaky and primed to gut their team even further as the trade deadline is set to hit around 4pm this afternoon. The Mets might do something too, although I don't really have the sense that they're going to. They sit in a bit of a grey area right now, not quite contenders, not totally out of it, but not in a position to make a deal for the sake of making a deal or appeasing the fans. This has been a strength of Sandy Alderson, not being reactionary, and so I'd be kind of surprised if anything impactful was done by the Mets, at least for today. The Waiver trade deadline is still a month away so anything can happen.