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And, once again, the Mets find a way to lose and look like schmucks on National TV. It seems like this always happens when they play a game broadcast by someone other than Gary, Keith and Ron. After spending 8 innings battling uphill against an actual Bear of a Pitcher, Jeurys Familia once again shit the bed in a non-Save situation and sent the Mets to a 4-2 defeat in front of a nationwide audience.

Sunday, the Mets made their second appearance on The Biggest Game In The Galaxy on ESPN. Having to sit through an inning and a half of Joe Buck and his non-entity color guy was bad enough. ESPN's announcers, though not as anti-Met as Buck, are so vanilla it's not even funny. This game literally put me to sleep in the 2nd inning and when I finally woke up, the Dodgers had a 2-0 lead and with Clayton Kershaw cruising, the game may as well have been over.

Unlike when they met in  Los Angeles, Bartolo Colon had a reasonably good outing this time around, yes, he gave up those two runs but he kept the Mets within shouting distance, which is about all you can hope for against Kershaw. Asdrubal Cabrera reached him for a Home Run in the 6th, and it certainly seemed as though that was going to be it for the Mets unless lightning struck somewhere.

Amazingly, lightning did strike, because somehow the Mets got Kershaw's pitch count up enough that they cajoled Dave Roberts to take him out of the game with 2 outs and a runner on 1st in the 8th inning. Conventional wisdom would have him go right to his closer, Kenley Jansen. Back when Celebrity Manager was in charge, he would have gone to Jansen, and he was constantly blinded by his own adoration. But for whatever reason, Roberts went to Adam Liberatore, who subsequently allowed Curtis Granderson to hit a triple over the head of a discombobulated Yasiel Puig to tie the game.

Given new life, the Mets went to Jeurys Familia in the 9th to hold the line...and Familia did a wonderful job of handing the game right back to the Dodgers. No sugarcoating on this one. No 9th inning bailout like on Friday. Familia gave up a hit and two walks and probably should have been removed from the game before he could let Adrian Gonzalez hit a jam shot into Center Field to score the winning runs. It's not as egregious as Friday, when he blew a 4-run lead and shouldn't have been in the game, but that's not taking away from it being really bad. Because this time, he should have been on the mound, and he STILL couldn't get the Dodgers out. I don't know if this is a hiccup or something more symbolic, but maybe he needs to visit the team Psychiatrist. If Familia has that big of an issue going out there in a non-save situation, there's something larger at work here. He hasn't blown a Save all season but he blew two games in 3 days. And there's other instances of him not being especially crisp on those odd days. I don't know and perhaps I'm not meant to understand it.