That Won't Work Either

For three innings on Thursday night, the Mets and Giants played the game that we expected them to play. Jacob deGrom and Madison Bumgarner were throwing darts, and throwing zeroes at each other. This was not at all of a surprise, seeing as how they've both placed themselves among the NL's most elite pitchers.

Then, the game hit the 4th inning and turned into something else entirely. What it was was definitely still baseball, but it was kind of a mockery of what you'd expect to see out of these two pitchers.

It started innocently enough, T.J. Rivera singled to start the inning, followed by a Jay Bruce strikeout. Bumgarner then walked Wilmer Flores and Travis d'Arnaud, and Justin Ruggiano followed.  Ruggiano is, in fact, a Met, in case you'd forgotten because he was signed out of nowhere, appeared here and then got hurt within the span of 3 days, but now he's back, and there he was hitting a Grand Slam off of Bumgarner to stake the Mets to a 4-0 lead. And when you can take a 4-0 lead off of Bumgarner and a Giants team that's been kind of reeling, well, you have to be feeling pretty good about yourself.

Of course, as good as you feel with a 4-0 lead is equal to how bad you feel when deGrom subsequently has a total meltdown in the bottom of the 4th inning and allows the Giants to first come back, and then ultimately take the lead when he gives up a Home Run to Bumgarner himself. It's not exactly a head-hanging shame to give up a Home Run to Bumgarner, who's clearly one of, if not the, best hitting pitcher in the game. But to have that come at the tail end of a 5-run inning is pretty bad. To make matters worse, deGrom came back for the 5th and allowed another 3 runs on top of it to turn his night into an utter bloodbath.

I know that the Mets came back and got it to 8-7, but unlike the Giants, they couldn't finish the deal, which sort of typifies everything that the Mets have done in the past 29 years. They get to within a run, against a weary Giants bullpen, they can't tie the game in spite of opportunities, and then Hansel Robles had one of those games where he has a Hamburger on the mound and instead of keeping the game where it is in the 8th, he gave up a 2-run double to Buster Posey which gave the Giants a 3-run lead.

By this point, I'd already thrown in the towel, because it was after 1am and I'd had enough, and really, if I was going to hang around and watch the Mets lose anyway, or I was going to get a little extra sleep, I'd go for the extra sleep. I kind of have the feeling that most Mets fans must feel the same way.