Rearranging

By all rights, Jacob deGrom should have picked up his first Major League win in Monday afternoon's game. His 6.2 innings of shutout ball represented his best outing to date since being recalled and furthermore, he's stabilized the pitching rotation from the gaps left by Gee and Mejia. He's unfortunately been given a grand total of 0 runs to work with over his first two starts, and so the two runs the Mets scored for him today certainly must have felt like a boatload to young Jacob.

Of course, the Mets bullpen did their best to ensure that deGrom would have to wait one more turn around the rotation to get that first win. Scott Rice started the 8th inning by allowing a Home Run to Gaby Sanchez, which isn't that big of a deal since it's more or less prerequisite that Gaby Sanchez hit a Home Run against the Mets (much better Sanchez than Ike Davis, who received a warm welcome in his return to Citi Field—much warmer than, say, the one afforded Oliver Perez over the weekend). Rice got the next two batters out, but Terry Collins then decided to remove Rice in favor of Jose Valverde.

Jose Valverde, as of about 5 minutes after the game, was then an ex-Met.

In between those two points in time, Valverde sealed his fate by allowing 4 hits, 1 walk and 4 runs while managing to get only 2 of the 4 outs necessary to seal a Met victory. Valverde allowed a spate of hits of the annoying variety, two of which served to tie the game in the 8th, the 3rd set up the lead run in the 9th, and the final one to—guess who—Gaby Sanchez—which gave the Pirates the lead and when Valverde failed to properly back up an errant throw from Curtis Granderson, allowed one more run to score and Sanchez to make it all the way to 3rd, where he would score on a sacrifice fly after Valverde was properly removed from the field.

Up until that point, the story of the game might have been the Mets netting a 5th inning run thanks to the never-before-seen Catcher's obstruction replay reversal that gave Juan Lagares a run. Instead, the tale of the tape involves the departure of Valverde, the return of Vic Black, and the dispatching of hitting coach Dave Hudgens.

Hudgens' removal is probably not as impactful, since the hitting coach doesn't actually take the field or hit the ball, but the performance of the team's offense has been pretty lousy of late and when they were going good, they were kind of sporadic. I don't know much about Lamar Johnson, but sometimes a new voice and a new philosophy can help a team that's scuffling. Whatever Hudgens had to offer wasn't working for guys like Lucas Duda, Chris Young and others.

Bad And Less Bad

Given that the Mets had flown cross-country after a Thursday night game in Atlanta and then managed to play two extra inning games on the West Coast, I suppose you couldn't blame the Mets too much for getting absolutely blasted on Sunday afternoon. The 14-2 pasting they received was, more or less, just one of those games that happens to a team that's gassed, although all the fearmongers are probably having a field day with it. The fact is, they were due for a true, first-rate stinker after walking a tightrope for a couple of games. Bartolo Colon got wrecked thanks to back-to-back-to-back Home Runs and everything pretty much went downhill from there. It's only my good fortune that I was out for a chunk of the afternoon and by time I arrived at home, the score was 9-2; the majority of the damage already done.

Long forgotten, then, was the fact that the Mets pulled their own asses out of the fire mere hours before, in a Saturday night affair that dragged well into Sunday morning on the East Coast. Their 13-inning, 7-6 win was more a stroke of good fortune rather than a great team victory. It would have simply been a good team victory had the game been closed out without any particular drama. The Mets got a Home Run from Lucas Duda, and a pair of key hits from Anthony Recker and, of all people, Omar Quintanilla, guys who seem to shine in Super Sub roles, and went into the bottom of the 9th with a 6-3 lead. Then, of course, Jose Valverde ran across his old nemesis Raul Ibanez, the game ended up tied, and an easy night turned into an endless, angst-y slog. But, against all odds, Scott Rice, Gonzalez Germen and John Lannan navigated their way through 4 perfect innings, long enough for Recker to finally run into a Matt Shoemaker fastball and hit it into the Orange County night for the game-winning Home Run.

The Saturday win was nice, and kind of helped take the sting away from the fact that they spit up the game on Friday. But, 24 innings in 2 games for an East Coast team playing night games on the West Coast isn't exactly a recipe for success, so as unwelcome as Sunday's debacle may have been, it can't really be considered a surprise. The best thing the Mets can do right now is to just pretend it didn't happen, shake it off and come out tonight in Arizona ready to go. A Major League team is probably much better-equipped to shake off games like this than we as fans are.

Then again, the Mets and D'Backs seem to have their own recent case history of absurdly-extended games, so maybe a trip to Arizona doesn't bode quite so well...

Dumbfounded

Tonight's game was my second of the season, my first April Night game and what feels like about the 132nd time I've made the (in hindsight) foolish choice to sit around at a Mets game when it was either really cold, really windy, annoyingly rainy or all three. Of course, tonight it was all three.

Yet, there was a much larger crowd on hand than I would have anticipated. After Thursday afternoon's particularly paltry attendance, with the team 0-3 and completely directionless, and bad weather in the forecast, I would have expected to be one of a mere handful of people on hand for the affair. I had dreams of some embarrassed staffer coming up and rescuing my colleague and I from the rain in the Promenade and sending us down to the warmth of the Delta Club. But as it turned out, people showed up. I don't know whether it was the lure of free T-Shirts (one size fits some), the lure of a Friday night at the Ballpark or the contingent of Cincinnati Reds fans that live in New York, but somehow, it felt like a reasonably decent crowd for a Baseball game. Granted, most fans seemed to have congregated in one of the indoor areas (a brief trip to the Promenade Club revealed a packed house) or underneath one of the few overhangs (which is where I ended up, as opposed to the seat I actually had a ticket for), but nonetheless, plenty of people were there, many of them wearing silly-looking David Wright T-shirts.

Fortunately, the people who braved the irritating drizzle that fell throughout the game combined with a whipping wind that came in at around the 8th inning and blew the rain sideways were ultimately rewarded with the Mets' first win of the season, finally. It wasn't exactly the prettiest of games, but certainly a little gem in its own right, as most Mets victories tend to be.

Lucas Duda of all people stepped up and won the game for the Mets offensively. This is pretty damn noteworthy in and of itself given how frequently and how voraciously I've flogged Duda over the past couple of seasons because of his general lack of ability to generate positive results. I was gearing up to write this long-winded post about the foibles of the Mets 1st Base situation and how giving the job to Duda over Davis, at least for now, couldn't possibly be the right answer. And who knows how it will play out from here, Duda could go back to being Duda and just standing around watching pitches without any particular sense of urgency, and striking out with men on base, and doing other such things that make him so Duda, but at least for one night he showed a bit of the potential he holds if he can ever get his ass in gear. Not only did he hit one Home Run with a runner on base, in the 4th inning off Mike Leake, which shocked the hell out of me, but two innings later, he came up with David Wright on base and damned if he didn't hit another Home Run. Now I was completely dumbfounded. Lucas Duda actually shut me up. And if that wasn't enough, by his next at bat, those who weren't completely frozen at Citi Field went so far as to chant his name.

The Beneficiary of Duda 4, Reds 1 through the 6th inning was Jenrry Mejia, who pitched great in his first start of the year in spite of borderline absurd conditions for pitching in a Major League Baseball game. Mejia, who's sort of become the lost man among the bigger-name pitching prospects and the more-established veterans, seemed to me to be the only truly viable candidate for the 5th Starter's job, and at some point he would make that evident. Collins made the right move picking Mejia over Molasses Matsuzaka and Levittown Lannan, and Mejia's effort, 8 strikeouts, 1 run and 4 hits in 6 innings against a particularly good Reds lineup is a bit of a statement. The 5 walks weren't so good, but for a control guy throwing a wet ball on a windy night, I think we can give him a pass. Mejia has been somewhat star-crossed since his ill-fated year being misused by Jerry Manuel, missing a season with elbow surgery and other such injuries, but last year he looked to finally turn a corner and I suspect he could be a rather pleasant surprise in the middle of the Mets rotation this season, enough so that he could conceivably change the strategy of who to keep and who's a pretty trade chip.

But, if there's one drawback to Mejia, it's that like most starting pitchers, he's only efficient enough to get himself through 6 innings, which is all well and good, but that left 3 innings and 9 outs for his bullpen to pick up for him, and that's not exactly gone well for the Mets so far this season. 4-1 quickly became 4-3 when John Lannan struck. Lannan, who's so bad I can't even waste the energy describing it in detail, was entrusted to specifically get the 3 lefty hitters at the top of the Reds lineup out. He managed to get two of them, Bernadina and Joey Votto (who's off to one of those starts where it seems his batting average is going to be .429 until Memorial Day), sandwiched around a Brandon Phillips single, but, of course, Jay Bruce got to him for a 2-run Home Run. Like one of those train wrecks that you can see coming and yet you can't look away. 4-1 was now 4-3, Collins was out to get Lannan out of the game and in came Kyle Farnsworth, who also fails to inspire much confidence. This didn't look good.

But Farnsworth, to his credit, stoned up and got 4 key outs. This despite the fact that he a) Had to contend with a windy rain that began whipping around so hard that if you're a glasses man like I am, you were having a difficult time seeing things and b) Had to contend with Billy Hamilton, who was sent in to Pinch Run after he walked Brayan Pena. Hamilton, who'd been off to a simply shocking 0-12 start at the plate, hadn't attempted a steal yet this season—because he hadn't managed to get on base to steal—so all eyes were on him as he went out to run. But to this point, running on the Mets has been a dicey proposition for him; last year, he was caught for the first time by Juan Centeno and tonight, Anthony Recker got him on a perfect strike of a throw. This pretty much cut short any chance the Reds would have off of Farnsworth, and so the game was left to the soap opera show that was a Jose Valverde 9th inning.

Valverde, in his first attempt to close a game with the Mets, did exactly what he's known to do: create all sorts of drama and then manage to get out of it. He walked Bernadina and gave up a hit to Phillips, just so he could have the high pleasure of trying to get through Votto and Bruce with men on base to save the game. I had sick, horrible visions of bloops and gap hits and Reds circling the bases, but somehow, Valverde induced Votto to swing at a sucker pitch and pop out to Left, and then struck out Bruce altogether, allowing him to jump around and pump his fist just like every other Mets fan who stuck it out on this miserable night, hoping to see the Mets finally nail down their first win of the season. They certainly managed to nail it down, at the expense of sanity and comfort, but as has always been the case, A win is a win, no matter how ugly it may have worked out.

Failure To Answer The Bell

Whether you had good expectations for the Mets over the course of the regular season or not is sort of academic as far as Opening Day is concerned. The Mets almost always come away with a victory on Opening Day, usually giving the fans that come out to see them some nice good vibes to take home for a couple of days. Usually. I've been to Opening Day each of the last 10 years now, and in years when Opening Day was actually Opening Day (and not just the home opener), the Mets are 4-1.

The one, of course, was yesterday, when a series of feel-good stories, courtesy of Dillon Gee, Andrew Brown and Juan Lagares ultimately dissolved into a series of failures by a Bullpen unit that was considered shaky to begin with and ended up justifying everyone's fears. Even worse, the Bullpen became even more shorthanded this morning when it was revealed that Bobby Parnell was injured and probably badly enough to require surgery.

Things started out reasonably well enough for the Mets, despite a few harbingers that things were going to go sour. First, Chris Young, who was expected to start in Left Field, came down with a Quad injury and couldn't play. Daniel Murphy was unavailable due to his impending fatherhood. Their absences, however, couldn't dampen the spirits of the fans, who were certainly out in full force despite great weather for Football (the wind so bad in the seating area that fans abandoned their seats in droves for the "warmer" confines of the concourses). Howie Rose welcomed everyone to the 2014 National League Season, the shofar was blown and away we went...except that the Mets took the field without a 1st Baseman. The missing man at 1st went on long enough for me to muse that perhaps the Mets had simply decided that no 1st Baseman was better than the ones they had, but then Ike Davis popped out of the dugout to the delight of everyone in attendance and away we went.

With 2 on and 2 out in the bottom of the 1st, courtesy of hits by Lagares and Wright, Andrew Brown came to the plate. George mused to me that he had no idea who the hell Brown even was. I mentioned that he was on the roster last season, but that he didn't do anything to particularly distinguish himself. The ensuing discussion of the exploits of Andrew Brown ended with the conclusion that Andrew Brown is a Professional Baseball player who plays in the Major Leagues and is capable of occasionally getting a hit. Brown then proved that he is also capable of running into a Stephen Strasburg fastball and blasting it into the Left Field seats for a 3-run Home Run. This was, of course, completely unexpected but nonetheless warmly welcomed by all who saw it.

Staked to an early lead, Dillon Gee, himself an unlikely presence on Opening Day, nonetheless went out and pitched great, save for one bad pitch to Adam LaRoche that was deposited into the bullpen. Following that, Gee settled in and retired 15 Nationals in a row, a streak that stretched into the 7th inning. For Gee, who'd pitched especially well over the 2nd half of last season, this was really picking up right where he'd left off. He pitched great, both effective and economical until he ran out of gas in the 7th. But he managed to get within shouting distance of getting out of the inning until Anthony Rendon reached him for an RBI double that made the score 4-3.

Then the Bullpen took over.

Then things pretty much went downhill from there.

It took 3 pitchers and 9 pitches before a Met reliever managed to throw a strike, which right there should tell you how well things were going. Carlos Torres walked his batter. Scott Rice walked his, forcing in the tying run and stripping Gee of what would have been a well-deserved win. Finally Jose Valverde, Papa Grande of all people, somehow managed to restore order to an imminent disaster, striking out Ryan Zimmerman after a sweaty 9-pitch at bat.

Valverde's perfect 8th inning was icing on the cake and for a hot second it appeared he would be the game's unsung hero when the second unlikely Mets Home Run of the day came courtesy of Juan Lagares leading off the bottom of the 8th. Lagares, like Brown, probably wasn't supposed to be in the Opening Day lineup, but circumstances brought him there, and Lagares, who seems to be one of those "if only..." guys on the Mets roster, justified his presence in the lineup with a pair of hits and 3 runs, including a laser of a Home Run off Tyler Clippard that briefly gave the Mets a 5-4 lead and had everyone dreaming of a nice, clean 9th inning and another happy Opening Day.

Then, of course, the rest of the game happened. Bobby Parnell didn't have it and Jeurys Familia and John Lannan had even less, and the result was a Blown Save and a 10th Inning meltdown that needs no recapping except to say that it was horrible and made a cold day feel even colder. Perhaps in another dimension, Lannan gets Anthony Rendon to pop out and David Wright ends up the hero, but instead, Wright's Home Run, which capped a 3-hit performance, was purely putting lipstick on the pig that was this 9-7 loss.

I suppose I probably should have known better than to think things would turn out well on a day that was so miserably cold in the wind tunnel that is the Citi Field Promenade that George and I willingly spent an inning watching from the Promenade Club. True, it's easy to overreact. But given the compounding circumstances surrounding the team, and the fans, and the general dissatisfaction with the way the organization has been going, how could any Mets fan come away from this game feeling very good? The bullpen is a complete disaster, at bats in key spots are being given to Lucas Duda and the equally worthless Omar Quintanilla, and even though they might be excused for having faced Strasburg, striking out 18 times on Opening Day is pretty far from confidence-inspiring. Hopefully this isn't a sign for the rest of the season.