Monday, May 8, 2017

Double Disaster

You know when you wake up, look at your phone and see an ESPN alert that reads "New York Mets P Matt Harvey suspended three games without pay for violating team rules" that it's going to be a great day.

In what shook out as yet another ugly chapter in the checkered career of Matt Harvey, the embattled pitcher was suspended on the day he was supposed to take the mound against the Marlins. Of course, in the Mets' typically macabre fashion, it was reported as reasons that were "going to be kept internal," and when you leave things like this up to the imaginations of the press and the public, well, everything kind of went haywire from there. Reports of reasons for this were typically ridiculous and thoughts of the obvious cause—what was that dildo doing in Kevin Plawecki's locker anyway???—were eventually quashed when it was reported that Harvey no-showed Saturday's game.

Sigh. I try to give Harvey the benefit of the doubt but then he does things like this and I wonder why I waste my energy.

At any rate, not only did he screw himself, he screwed his team, since instead of throwing him at the Marlins on Sunday, we were subjected to poor Adam Wilk, who ostensibly was the closest thing to a warm body the Mets had available to pitch a game. And, you know, when the best guy you can throw out on the mound is a guy who maybe 10% of your fan base has heard of...Needless to say, it didn't go well.

Wilk's afternoon could rather simply be summed up as he was screwed the moment Giancarlo Stanton stepped in the batter's box. In the first inning, he hit a Home Run off the facing of the 2nd deck in Left Field. In the 3rd, he hit one even farther. By the 4th, the game was completely out of hand and Wilk was done for the day, and one can assume into the Met annals next to such names as Chan Ho Park and Brett Hinchcliffe. Therest of the team, which was probably suffering from shellshock stemming either from the Harvey news, or Wilk's performance, or both, barely made a peep against Jose Urena and the end result was that they mustered one hit in a thoroughly embarrassing 7-0 loss.

And, you know, it's "now what?" time again. The Mets now sit at 14-16, which considering the state of the team health-wise isn't awful, but if you believe what you read about the Mets, the bloom is off the rose and the team is spiraling out of control towards a 90-loss season and a return to obscurity. I don't know. Right now, all I know is that that's their record and now they're finally going to play some games against teams outside their division and eventually, the truth will come out. About everything.

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