Terrible And Terrible

It seems, just because of the nature of Baseball, that there are a few times each season where the Mets just deserve to be absolutely humiliated, for one reason or another. Whether it's because they don't hit, or they don't pitch, or they don't do either, or they're just not putting a team on the field worthy of a Major League game, they just deserve it.

Tonight at Citi Field was one of those nights.

It was my 9th game of the season, and I just kind of had an ominous feeling about things. I think most Mets fans probably did. If it wasn't bad enough that half the lineup was on the DL, the remaining useful pieces were somehow injured and yet not on the DL, meaning the active roster was clogged up with dead weight, meaning the Mets had to throw out a starting lineup with Alejandro De Aza leading off, and Kelly Johnson hitting 5th...and what's the use?

Jameson Taillon, in his 2nd Major League game, by all rights probably should have no-hit the Mets tonight. The Mets were just screaming to be no-hit. They spent most of the game swinging out of their shoes and mostly rolling over pitches to the point where I think I'd marked "4-3" in my scorecard before the batter even swung. Taillon threw 6 pitches in the 1st inning, and by the end of the 5th he'd barely cracked 50, and the Mets hadn't even sniffed a hit. I was beginning to think that they'd just bored the crowd to death until the end of the 6th inning, when, after another inning of Mets batters hitting weak rollers to 1st, there was an audible smattering of boos coming from the crowd. Most of them had had it. Hell, I'd had it. Here I was, about to watch the Mets get no-hit by a rookie for the 2nd year in a row. I'd already lived through the horror of Chris Heston. I didn't need to do this again.

Then again, when Curtis Granderson singled to lead off the 7th and break up the no-hit bid, the game turned from something ignominious to just plain boring. And the crowd that was slipping into the terror zone kind of just faded out into the night.

And all I'm thinking is Poor Jacob deGrom. Once again he pitched his ass off and for a while had the Pirates totally tied in knots. But he made one mistake pitch to Jung Ho Kang in the 6th, and Kang parked it in the seats and that basically was the entire game right there. I know somewhere, someone is blaming Jim Henderson for giving up the second HR to Starling Marte in the 8th or blaming Terry Collins for leaving Henderson in for a 2nd inning, and lord knows my initial reaction was to wonder why Henderson was still in the game, but in reality, did it matter? The game was already over. Why split hairs?

I guess the solace you can take here is that it seems like every June, the Mets go into stink mode where they stop hitting and everything is terrible, and last year they somehow managed to pull themselves out of the stew. Unfortunately, we still have to live through it. That's probably the most terrible thing of it all.