Too Little, Too Late

If I were a Washington Nationals fan, after I finished reading the Political section of the Washington Post and cleared the dishes from my Breakfast nook in my posh Dupont Circle apartment, I might go for a jog down Connecticut Avenue. Afterward, I'll come back home and take another glance at that dog-eared copy of the Post to see Max Scherzer celebrating his second No Hitter of the season, and think to myself, "Where was that when it mattered?"

Fortunately, I am not a Nationals fan, and when it mattered most, the Nationals couldn't beat the Mets. The Mets battered Scherzer when they faced him in early September, and though he's handed the Mets the ignominy of being no-hit for the second time this season, it's far too late for it to make much of a difference. The same can be said for Gio Gonzalez in the early game. Yes, he held the Mets down and the Nationals won the game, but when it mattered, Gio was awfully pedestrian.

That being said, the Mets continue to not make a very good case for themselves going into the Postseason. This little cold snap that's blown over the offense has now turned into a 5-game losing streak, and they've scored 1 run in their last 3 games. This has, unfortunately, led to the Dodgers clinching the home field advantage for the impending NLDS, but again, I'm still not certain that this bothers the Mets that much.

On the upside, and if there is such an upside to being no-hit, at least I wasn't there to see it like I was last time. Instead, I only got to find out about it after the fact. In the Mets' defense, Scherzer pulled off the feat in another game where the Mets ran out their "D" lineup, as a majority of the regular starters sat out the frigid nightcap and those who played found themselves totally declawed by Scherzer. Additionally, when it comes to teams getting no-hit twice in a season, the Mets will in fact be facing a team in the NLDS that's pulled off the same feat.

On the upside, the Mets pitching looks ready to rock and roll. Noah Syndergaard stepped on Washington's throat in the early game and the Mets only lost when Addison Reed faltered in the 8th. In the later game, Matt Harvey finished off his regular season with a stellar 6 innings of work, striking out 11 and probably would have been the story of the game had he not gone up against Washington's Small Time Hero. But, such is life.

One more, this afternoon, and then the Mets will have to pull their shit together. A win today would be nice, though.

Rock Bottom

So, ah, I went to a Baseball game at Citi Field tonight and I ended up witnessing History.

It was my 9th game at Citi Field this season, and I had kind of a bad feeling about things before I even got to the stadium. It wasn't anything particular, just that the Mets hadn't been going well, and in recent years, when I've gone to Mets/Giants games, I sort of feel like I may as well be at Pac Bell Park or whatever phone company that stadium is named for, because the Giants Fans seem to take the place over. I realize that their fans may travel well, but after having won 3 World Series Championships in 5 years, they're a bit emboldened, too. So that right there kind of gave me a bad vibe. That feeling, however, was somewhat tempered when I noticed a post from the Mets on my Facebook feed noting that it was, in fact, the anniversary of one of my favorite games, the infamous Bobby Valentine "Moustache" game, way back in 1999. You know, when the Mets could hit.

Little did I know what I was walking in to.

There's not much that can be said about the game. Basically, if you looked at the pitching matchup of Noah Syndergaard and Chris Heston, and someone said one of them would throw a No Hitter, well, you probably wouldn't have picked Heston, and probably because on this side of the country, you'd have a hard time picking Heston out of a lineup. But he just had one of those nights where the stars aligned for him. Syndergaard didn't pitch especially badly, but the Giants just kept dinging him to death, which is sort of what they do. They hit single after single, and when Heston chipped in with a 2-run single in the 4th to turn a 1-0 game into a 3-0 game, I sort of felt like the Mets were screwed right there.

Again, little did I know.

Heston had retired the first 9 Mets, which wasn't so noteworthy, seeing as how they had their B-lineup out there, and when the A-lineup is lousy, you can only imagine the B-lineup (the C-lineup includes Danny Muno and Darrell Ceciliani). Finally, in the 4th, the Mets had what could laughably be called a rally when Heston hit Ruben Tejada and then hit Lucas Duda, and then Michael Cuddyer hit into a Double Play, and that was about as good as it got for the Mets the rest of the night. Heston kept getting Mets hitters to pound ground balls directly at Giants infielders, or he just struck them out.

I've been to multiple games where No Hitters have been taken into late innings, most recently two years ago when Matt Harvey retired the first 20 White Sox and only a ground ball too deep in the hole at Shortstop prevented him from taking things further. I've mentioned that there's sort of a murmur in the middle innings that kind of swells as the game progresses and builds into a fever pitch. This is what was happening as each inning passed and the Mets failed to get a hit. Except that it was the Giants fans that were building up. I and the other Mets fans kind of sat in this silent, stewing horror, because the longer this kept going, the more it seemed that this game was too far gone. Heston rolled through the 6th...7th...8th innings...Nothing. Nothing that could have even been close to a hit was coming. By the 9th, it kind of seemed inevitable. Once the home plate umpire started calling everything close a strike, you knew it was over. Heston hit Recker to start the inning, but Muno  watched a 3rd strike, and Curtis Granderson did the same, and it was down to Ruben Tejada, and, well, when Ruben Tejada is the last man standing between you and History...

...

In some perverse way, I'm almost glad that this happened to the Mets. Sometimes, you need to be completely humiliated in order to really get to the bottom of what's wrong. This team just doesn't hit, and it's been going on for weeks. Sure, Travis d'Arnaud will be back in the lineup tomorrow, but he alone isn't going to make things better. For whatever reason, someone seemed to think that the team was OK with guys like Eric Campbell, Muno, Ceciliani and Ruben Tejada heavily involved on the depth chart. I mentioned this in passing a few days ago, but when injuries strike en masse and there's not a solid contingency plan, you end up with the entire season spiraling out of control like it did in 2009 (and let's not start in with the whole Ray "cortisone shot" Ramirez issue—they have this massage therapist that everyone loves so much, maybe they ought to look into hiring a Yogi or something). You can kind of mask it with the fact that they have really good pitching, but how many times this season have you had instances where Matt Harvey or Bartolo Colon pitched an awesome game and ended up losing 2-1 or 3-2 because nobody could drive in a run. Duda and Cuddyer have been hot and cold, which is to be expected, and so have Lagares and Flores. These guys aren't the issue right now. Everyone else is a problem. Daniel Murphy was going well before he got hurt, but in the end, his problem is that he's Daniel Murphy and you're not going to get anything better than Daniel Murphy. Curtis Granderson has been a disaster. Campbell has played far more than he should be playing (the curse of Alex Cora).

I could go on, but the point here is that this isn't sustainable. Somehow the Mets have managed to tread water because the teams around them haven't played well either, but with that being said, can you imagine if the Mets had a lineup? So, when you have a No Hitter thrown at you, in your own building, by a Rookie that nobody's heard of (although I'm sure everyone knows who Chris Heston is now), maybe this is the kick in the ass the Mets need. This is a total embarrassment and I think that the Mets needed to be embarrassed like this. They should be embarrassed. They deserved to have this happen to them. Everyone's culpable from the top down, and maybe having this happen will light a fire under their asses to make a move and shake something up. This isn't the sort of performance that fans are willing to accept anymore and I have to imagine that it's not acceptable to the front office either. On a beautiful Tuesday night in June, the paid attendance was something like 23,000 and I'd guess in the stadium there were probably about 16,000, and at least 40% of that were Giants fans. Mets fans don't believe in this team and after a performance like this, can you blame them? So, time to get your heads out of your asses, Fred, Ratso, Sandy, Terry and everyone else. No more. I hope everyone watches this game multiple times just to be reminded of how the Mets once again managed to make complete asses of themselves.

Hard To Imagine

In spite of the fact that yesterday's 3:whatever pm start time precluded me from seeing any of the game live, it did, in fact, allow me to see more of the replay of the game last night than I did of any of the other two games the Mets played in Seattle this week combined. I made it up until the 8th inning of the game before other activities took precedence; by that point I'd seen the story of the game, which was Bartolo Colon rather quietly and effortlessly setting down the first 20 Mariners that came to the plate, finally surrendering a hit to the 21st man, Robinson Cano.

It was mentioned that this was only the 5th time in Mets history that a starting pitcher had retired the first 20 batters that had faced him in a game. One such effort came just last season, when Matt Harvey had perhaps the single best game of his career to this point against the White Sox, a game I was fortunate enough to witness in person. Tom Seaver did it during his "Imperfect" game in 1969. Then, there were the two times in June of 1998 that Rick Reed accomplished this feat, both of which happened to be nights I was in attendance at Shea Stadium. Colon was the first Mets pitcher to carry a Perfect Game into the 7th inning on the road, and this, combined with the bizarre start time, may have served to ensure that this game is kind of lost in the shuffle when it comes to great Mets Pitching Performances. It also doesn't help that Colon unraveled slightly in the 8th, and eventually had to be rescued by the suddenly stellar Bullpen tandem of Jeurys Familia and Jenrry Mejia in order to close out a tenuous 3-2 win over the Mariners. That's not to take anything away from Colon. When you retire the first 20 batters that face you in a game, no matter when it happens or whom your opponent is, it's still an accomplishment.

Colon's effort was backed by a minimal offensive output. The Mets scored a run early off of Taijuan Walker courtesy of Daniel Murphy and at some point other runs were scored but I can't say I remember how they happened. Somehow, the Mets ended up with 3 of them, which was enough to win the game. It would have been a bit of a burn if, after Colon had pretty much stuck the bats in the Mariners' ears all afternoon, they came back and stole the game. But that didn't happen, and thusly, almost 10 years after their first trip out to the great Pacific Northwest, the Mets came away with a series victory in Seattle, evening up their record on the West Coast to 3-3. That's fine and dandy for a West Coast trip, and certainly beats them doing something disastrous like going 1-5 and completely falling off the cliff, but if they're going to prove that they have some life in them for the remainder of the season, 3-3 against teams like the Padres and Mariners isn't necessarily going to cut it. Particularly since they're now leaving the land of Pearl Jam in favor of Jaegermeister and Bratwurst in Milwaukee. We'll see how this goes.

Fondly Remembered

In May of 2003, Mike Piazza went down with a groin injury, taking his thunderous bat out of the lineup with him. At the time, it struck me how little it actually mattered. The Mets weren't going anywhere particularly good, and Piazza at that point of the season had begun a descent into the latter portion of his career, no longer the elite offensive threat that we were used to him being. His injury, more or less, led to the chain reaction of useless veterans like Jeromy Burnitz and Roberto Alomar being traded away and younger players like Ty Wigginton and Jason Phillips emerged. No, they didn't really have any particular impact on the future of the Mets, but for that season, it was nice to see some new, fresh blood get a chance to prove themselves on a larger stage. It made a bad year interesting.

I bring this instance up because in light of the recent news of Johan Santana's re-injured shoulder and season-ending surgery, I couldn't help but have a similar reaction. A few years ago, this news might have been greeted as an unmitigated catastrophe. But what, realistically, could the most optimistic of Mets fans have forecast for Santana? Behind schedule on rehab, he wouldn't have been on the mound on Opening Day, and even then, what could have been expected? Since arriving in 2008, Santana has pitched out a full season but once, in that first year, and seen his season cut short or cut completely in every year since. It probably was not likely that he would have pitched all season, and even then, it would have likely been at a reduced rate of success than we were used to seeing, perhaps something out of latter-years Pedro Martinez, plus a period of time when he'd probably need extra rest. Best case scenario was that he would be healthy, have a solid first half of the season, and the Mets would trade him for a prospect, because give that 2013 was his walk year, it was almost certain that 2013 would be his last with the Mets.

Unfortunately, it won't even get that far. It was a real longshot for Santana to come back from the initial shoulder surgery, one which had never been performed on a Pitcher and required a painstaking amount of rehab, and even then, a return to effectiveness was not guaranteed. But when Santana came back and looked just as good as ever, I'm sure it was easy to forget just what he was trying to overcome. What he was able to accomplish in 2012 was nothing short of amazing, but just as he reached his peak—Throwing his No Hitter—the magic ran out just as quickly, leaving Santana at a career crossroads.

It's likely that we've seen the last of Johan in a Mets uniform, and that's a shame in and of itself. The Mets were never good enough around him to carry the team to the level we hoped. But in the process, Santana certainly provided a multitude of great moments and great memories that will far outweigh the negatives or the feeling of unfulfillment. He owns two of the greatest single-game pitching performances in Mets History. Even when he wasn't making history or saving the Mets asses, he was doing something interesting, and I always think of a pair of other games that get lost amidst those moments of higher prestige. One such game came in September of 2008, on a Sunday night against the Phillies. Sure, the show was stolen by Carlos Delgado, but it was Santana who gutted it out into the 8th inning against a murderous Philly lineup, trying to protect a lead from an even more frightening Mets bullpen. The second came in July of 2010, against the Reds. In addition to hitting his first career Home Run, Santana pitched a 3-hit shutout. In the 9th inning, Jason Bay dropped a routine fly ball, putting runners on 1st and 2nd with 1 out and the tying run at bat. Jerry Manuel came to the mound. Fans were screaming to leave him in the game. Manuel consulted with his ace, and I guess he liked what he heard, because he left Santana in the game. It took Santana all of 2 pitches to finish off the Reds.

Johan Santana took the mound and pitched with his heart and with his head every time out. He may not have a championship to certify his career, but everyone who ever saw him take the mound knows just how good he was. I'm glad we had our time together.

Curtain Call

Baseball is a funny game, isn't it.

For 50 seasons and 8,019 regular season games, the Mets never had a pitcher who threw a No-Hit game, fact that seemed to take on a life of its own. It was part of the Mets culture. I'm sure many of us thought it might never happen. But it has. Baseball  is a game of averages, and by the law of averages, everything has to happen at some point. Just like until 2004, no team had ever come back from 0-3 down to win a Playoff series, and we saw the Red Sox do that. Someone, someday, would take the mound for the Mets, the stars would align, and someone would throw that elusive No Hitter.

And last night, June 1, 2012, that day finally came, that pitcher finally took the mound, and that No Hitter was had.

4 years ago, I'd anointed Johan Santana as worth every penny the Mets would be paying him over the course of his contract. He's done nothing, ever, to make me doubt that, even when he missed all of 2011 with a shoulder injury that put the remainder of his career in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Santana never complained, he never got down on himself or his teammates when they couldn't back him up, he persevered and came back from his injury looking just as good as before he left, and now, he's been rewarded by being the man on the mound the night the stars aligned and a Mets pitcher finally threw a No Hitter.

I wasn't at last night's game, although I wish I was. Frugality deterred me from picking an innocuous blue-colored Friday Night game on the schedule (instead, I'm stuck with tickets for Monday Afternoon which I probably should just sell), and, in fact, I missed the first 6 innings of the game altogether while out to dinner. By time I returned, I was pleased with what I was seeing. I hadn't yet gotten the word that Santana was pitching a gem, but a 5-0 lead against the Cardinals is always a good thing.

So the 6th ends, and I see that the Cardinals have no hits. I notify a friend, although after 6 innings, I'm still not properly conditioned to take this seriously. I once saw Rick Reed take a Perfect Game into the 7th inning...twice. One time, he lost the game completely. I once saw Mark Clark take a No Hitter into the 8th inning. I saw R.A. Dickey hold the Phils into the 7th inning last September. It's too early to get too nervous. But Santana continued to mow the Cardinals down. Yadier Molina made a strong bid to break things up—certainly would have been fitting for him to screw us over again—but Mike Baxter saved the day at the cost of his shoulder. Those are the kind of plays you need. At that point, you could start to feel the stars aligning. I hadn't yet heard about Beltran's foul ball in the 5th, but sometimes, you just get those breaks.

By the 8th, I started getting nervous. Something just felt different this time. Maybe it was simply just the presence of Santana himself, and all he'd been through the last couple of seasons just to get to this point. He wasn't supposed to be doing THIS, was he? He wasn't supposed to be blowing through his pitch count with reckless abandon. And yet, he couldn't come out. After a 2-out walk, Terry Collins came running to the mound. There was no way he could take Santana out. Santana would have thrown him back into the dugout if he'd tried. Beltran was next, and now, I was flinching every time a Cardinal made contact. But the contact was never solid enough to scoot past the infield, or to whiz over the head of an outfielder. Beltran's swing produced a meek floater that was caught by Daniel Murphy. And all of a sudden, Santana was now in Tom Seaver territory.

I'd like to say that the 9th inning was just a mere formality. I suppose one might say that if they didn't have a pulse. I'd seen 9th innings of No Hitters before, and I wondered what it would be like if it ever happened to the Mets. Well, now I know. It's about 5-7 minutes of torturous hell. I was afraid to move or do much of anything other than stare blankly at the TV. Watching Santana deliver pitch after pitch, and hoping this wouldn't be the one that would find its way through, and wreck our shot at History once again. But it wasn't going to happen on June 1, 2012. First Holliday and then Allen Craig flew out. David Freese was the last man standing. David Freese has never done anything particularly bad to the Mets, but he certainly made a name for himself last October. And so, on a night where demons from the past were well abound, with Adam Wainwright starting—and losing— for the Cardinals, where Yadier Molina was robbed by a Mets leftfielder, David Freese completed the circle, waving at one final, signature changeup from Johan Santana, and, in the words of Gary Cohen, "IT HAS HAPPENED!!!"

 

It was somewhat surreal. I really couldn't believe I'd actually seen a Mets pitcher throw a No Hitter. But, there it was. We have to believe it, because we all saw it. We have to believe it, because, Johan Santana himself told his teammates to "BELIEVE IT!" after the game. Whatever Santana does the rest of his time here doesn't matter. I think I said that before. He's already cemented himself as one of the Best the Mets have ever had. He's accomplished something we never thought we'd see. And for the guy in the Promenade who always screams "THE STREAK CONTINUES!" every time the opponent gets their first hit of the game, well, this one's for you, because I never have to hear you say that again! 

The Streak Does Not Continue

It happened. We all just saw it.

Johan Santana just threw the first No-Hitter in Mets History.