The Usual Story

I was out for a majority of the evening last night and didn't actually get to watch the Mets/Nationals affair, but based on everything I read and heard, I didn't miss anything of particular importance. As they usually do, the Nationals came in to Citi Field, bombed a bunch of Home Runs, Bartolo Colon and Terry Collins were ejected from the game in the 4th inning, and the end result was the Nationals 13th consecutive win at Citi Field.

This was the kind of game I usually find myself attending late in the season, against Washington, where there's about 4-5,000 people in the seats and the Mets do nothing particularly well, and the Nationals end up coming away with a victory. Whether it was because this was a weekend series or I'd wised up against willfully choosing to attend a September Mets/Nationals game, I have no tickets for this weekend's series, and with an assortment of other pressing matters coming across my docket, it's unlikely that I'm even going to see any of these games going on over the next few days. Something tells me, particularly based on the way things went tonight, that I'm probably doing myself a favor.

There are plenty of teams that seem to have been the Mets' nemesis over these several miserable years, among them the Phillies, although their tide has turned for the worse as well. The Marlins have always been annoying, particularly when they play in Miami, which affects me little. The Cardinals and Dodgers also always seem to give the Mets a good kick in the pants. But nobody seems to typify these years of futility quite like the Nationals at Citi Field. Even in the seasons when the Nationals were bad, they still managed to come in to New York and beat the Mets, and to make matters worse, they do so by blasting Home Runs all over the place. Last September, the Mets were swept in a 4-game series in Citi Field where the Nationals hit 41 Home Runs over the 4 games. I believe Ian Desmond hit 6, Adam LaRoche and Wilson Ramos hit 5 each, and Bryce Harper and Jayson Werth each hit 3. It's almost reached comical proportions—you can't get too upset because it's not like the Nationals are keeping the Mets from participating in something resembling a pennant race—but from what my memory serves, this has been going on pretty much ever since the Nationals moved to Washington 10 years ago.

Perhaps this is just one more reason I feel so nostalgic for the Montreal Expos. Never mind my love for Montreal as a City, but at least when their Baseball team came to New York, you at least felt as though the Mets had a fighting chance. Now? You just hope that the Nationals don't hit 4 Home Runs in any given game. True, tonight, they only hit two, but this got them out to a 6-0 lead by the 4th inning, and each Home Run was followed by Bartolo Colon hitting the subsequent batter. When he struck Jayson Werth in the 4th following Anthony Rendon's Home Run, whether he was doing it on purpose or not, he was tossed from the game while Werthless preened and postured like he was going to charge the mound.

The Mets were offensive on offense against Tanner Roark and whoever else the Nationals threw out there, and so that 6 run cushion Roark was given was more than enough. No more needs to be said on the matter.

In fact, let's just not say any more about this game in general. Someday, the Mets will figure out how to beat this team at home, but maybe it's just not worth paying attention to anymore, at least for this season.