Unable To Finish

Monday night, I got home, took a rest, and got up just in time for the beginning of the game.
Tuesday night, I got home, took a rest, and got up just in time for the top of the 2nd inning.

Clearly, I'm slipping.

I was slipping pretty hard by time the 4th inning came around, and I'd finished making dinner. My other half and I then sat down to eat, but she started yammering about how she wanted to watch something else instead of the game. I can't say I blame her, given how lousy the Mets have been lately, but I would have preferred to watch the game as opposed to the alternative. But, I relented and let her have her way. At the time, the game was scoreless.

And, as such, when she'd finished watching her program, I put the game back on and saw that it was 4-1 Mets. Little did I know that I'd missed the real show, Noah Syndergaard smoking his 3rd Home Run of the season to stake the Mets to a rare lead. On the mound, Syndergaard was making it stand up, looking better than he had in weeks before he tired in the 6th and his defense betrayed him.

For Syndergaard, this is, perhaps, a bit of a corner turn, since he looked much fresher. He hasn't exactly been suffering for velocity and really the stuff looks OK, but that little extra something he had early in the season hasn't been there. We've talked about him dissolving into Leiteritis far too often, but it seems like he had it back, somewhat. After the Diamondbacks beat and kind of embarrassed him last Wednesday, he got a bit of revenge, holding the Diamondbacks down into the 6th. He probably could have made it through the 6th, but for a pair of errors by T.J. Rivera that not aided a 3-run rally but forced Syndergaard to waste more pitches until he was ultimately unable to finish the inning.

At that point, it being late and I still being tired (and with an early morning today) I shut the game off altogether. Whatever was going to happen would happen, and, well, if it was going to be bad, I didn't want to be around to see it. A 7-1 lead had shrunk to 7-4 and given the way the Mets have handled the Diamondbacks this season that didn't really sit comfortably with me.

But, as I rose this morning, I see that the Mets did, in fact, hang on to win the game 7-5, so that's something.

Daily Rewind

The Mets stomped the Phillies on Wednesday afternoon 11-2 in an afternoon affair that was, as usual, at a rumor level for me since I was at work while it was happening. The 12pm start time for games is odd enough to begin with. I can't imagine what it must be like to be at one. On the one hand, it can't be much different from the classic 1:10pm game, but those are the kinds of games you can get used to. Plus, the only time I really ever go to a 1:10pm game is on Opening Day, or the rare afternoon on a weekend where I have nothing particularly better to do with myself. 12:10pm seems too close to to being prior to noon, and therefore being a morning start time. That only works if you're in Boston and it's Patriots' Day.

Fortunately, SNY does a wonderful thing and replays pretty much every afternoon game at around 7 or 7:30pm and sometimes truncates it so that I'm able to have some idea of what happened during the game. It also confounds Mrs. Mets2Moon quite a bit; she just assumes that I'm watching the game until it gets to be late and she wonders why the sun is still out in Queens. Lately, she has wised up and started asking me "Is it live?" when she gets home just to make sure.

This afternoon's affair, which I saw in the evening, consisted of Zack Wheeler continuing his string of fine outings, a happily recycled comment. Wheeler worked himself into the 7th in spite of not necessarily having his best stuff, and only allowed two runs. Fortunately, Wheeler was the beneficiary of an opposite field 3-run Home Run by Daniel Murphy in the 5th inning, which served to give the Mets the lead and more or less break the game open in one of those moments that could end up being replayed forever depending on how things break out. If nothing else, it's certainly a moment that makes a season in review program on SNY when you talk about key hits by Daniel Murphy.

Murphy's Home Run off of Kyle Kendrick—pitching against the Mets for the 237th time in his illustrious career—set the stage for more fireworks later in the game, among them a merry-go-round 7th inning rally that produced five runs on five separate RBI hits, the last one produced by Jeurys Familia of all people, who doesn't appear at bat often but apparently has acquitted himself well enough since he's now 2 for 3 lifetime with an RBI—better than a large number of regulars in Mets history—and one inning later the scoring was capped by a monster Home Run by Lucas Duda in the 8th inning, which much to everyone's delight has become a near-daily occurrence.

The win gave the Mets a series win over the Phillies, which is something they should be doing these days. The Phillies are old, creaky and primed to gut their team even further as the trade deadline is set to hit around 4pm this afternoon. The Mets might do something too, although I don't really have the sense that they're going to. They sit in a bit of a grey area right now, not quite contenders, not totally out of it, but not in a position to make a deal for the sake of making a deal or appeasing the fans. This has been a strength of Sandy Alderson, not being reactionary, and so I'd be kind of surprised if anything impactful was done by the Mets, at least for today. The Waiver trade deadline is still a month away so anything can happen.

Not What You Were Looking For

Too many things happened too early in this game that are worth mentioning, simply as thoughts and coincidences. As has happened on many an occasion, I was late in getting home and when I finally did arrive and put the game on, I was greeted with a line that read OAK 6, NYM 0 in the bottom of the 2nd inning, Zack Wheeler already removed from the game.

My first thought: Well, I'm glad I went last night instead of tonight.

My second thought: Well, so much for Zack Wheeler going out and using his brilliant shutout performance in Miami as a springboard to bigger and better things, because he just regressed right back to his usual inconsistent dreck.

I didn't actually see any of what Wheeler did, but it seems he basically had nothing from the get-go. Brandon Moss, the former castoff-turned-#3-hitter reached him for a Home Run in the 1st, and the 2nd inning consisted of some bloops and blasts and Oakland players circling the bases. So, basically, by time I got home and put the game on, there really wasn't much of a game worth watching.

Games like this are terrible, not just because the Mets are hopelessly out of the game before the entire audience has reached their seats, but because after a day of work, I often look forward to coming home and putting the game on, and when I get home and put on a game where the Mets are behind 6-0 in the 2nd inning, it's like why even bother? I don't want to see Dana Eveland come in and work mop-up, I don't want to see the Mets just swing through Brad Mills' array of slop, I just want to shut the game off and go find something else to do with myself. This, of course, is complicated since there's a limited amount of things I can bear to watch on TV, and none of them are on on Wednesday nights. Thus, I ceded things to my other half, who happily put on a reality show of insidious nature, which didn't make me feel any better.

I missed, by giving up on the proceedings, something of a cosmetic comeback by the Mets. Down 8-0, Lucas Duda hit a Lucas Duda—a 3-run Home Run that had absolutely no consequence except to prevent the Mets from being shut out altogether—and Chris Young also hit a Home Run in the 8th, so instead, when you look back at this game and see the Mets lost 8-5, you might thing, "Hey, Barnburner!" instead of knowing the truth about this shit show. In the present, it might have actually kidded a few hearty souls into thinking comeback, although given the Mets propensity for 8-run comebacks is more or less non-existent, thoughts like that are born out of wishful thinking more than actual intuition. But, then again, when you have a game like this, wishful thinking is more or less all you've got. At least I went the night before. I know I said that already but it needs to be reiterated.

Everything Is Terrible

I haven't read or heard any reaction to last night's debacle in Miami, but I would suppose that the prevailing thought across the board is that when Matt Harvey pitches and the Mets still can't win a game, then things are probably worse than we thought.

To his credit, Harvey hasn't ever actually pitched poorly this season. Last night he again minimized damage, but his one mistake, which was surprisingly enough not that he gave up, but that he wasn't economical enough with his 6 innings of work. It's something he's alternately good and bad with, but that's the travails of a young pitcher. But for his efforts, he deserved a win. In fact, he always deserves a win.

But the remainder of the game still had to be played, and the Mets, who only managed to score on a John Buck Home Run, just couldn't be bothered to squeeze an insurance run across. That's not to say that multiple opportunities didn't present themselves. It appears to me that pretty much every Mets inning that the Mets came to bat from the 7th on played out something like this:

1. Single to Right
2. Sacrifice Bunt, runner moves to 2nd
3. Ground out to the right side, runner moves to 3rd
4. Line out to the Shortstop. Runner stranded.

And so on, and so forth.

Nonetheless, the Mets were in position to beat the miserable Marlins, who appeared to be just as offensively challenged. I didn't like the Mets inability to build on their lead, but surely, the bullpen ought to have been able to hold the lead. Come the 9th inning, my other half, who was waiting to watch a program that was recording on the DVR, asked when the game was ending. I said it was the 9th inning. She said, "Oh good, so it'll be over soon." I replied, "Yes, unless some unforeseen disaster happens. Of course, this is the Mets we're talking about, so who knows..."

Of course. I seemed prophetic a few minutes later when Bobby Parnell blew the lead. It wasn't entirely Parnell's fault. He probably should have gotten Rob Brantly out, but for Collin Cowgill making the True Met play and breaking back on a fly ball when he should have broken in, allowing the ball to fall in for a hit and giving the Marlins the opportunity to scrape the tying run across.

The 10th inning began, and my other half came back into the room. "What!? 10th Inning!?" she yelled.

"Well, the Mets turned back into the Mets," was the only reply I could muster.

The game continued. A stream of Mets continued to either strike out or ground out to the second baseman with runners on base, while Met relievers continued to plow through punchless Marlin bats.  My other half came back in the room some time later.

"12th inning!?" she yelled, "That doesn't happen!"

I had no good answer. For all I could tell, this game could go on for weeks, or until someone ran out of pitchers.

Finally, in the 13th, I relented. The game appeared both endless and hopeless, and I'd basically lost patience. "This game isn't ever going to end," I said to my now-weary other half. "You may as well watch your show now."

So, she did. I figured someone ought to have figured out how to get a hit with a runner in scoring position in the meantime. But by time she watched her show and put the game back on, the score remained 2-2, now in the 15th inning. This prompted her to ask a question about the longest game ever. On cue, Ruben Tejada singled home a run. Miracle of miracles, the Mets actually scored another run after striking out 33 times and going 0-for-27 with men in scoring position. Surely, Shaun Marcum, voluntarily pressed into an emergency relief outing, could navigate his way through 3 more outs.

Unfortunately, surely appears to be a dicey proposition for the Mets these days. Marcum managed one of those 3 outs before the Marlins tied the game, and then one batter later won the game, leaving Marcum to walk off the field with a well-deserved puss on his face.

Fortunately, the Marlins don't have notorious Met-haters like Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla on the team anymore, so their walk-off celebrations against the Mets don't have quite the same oomph they once did. With this incarnation of the Marlins, they appear to simply be happy to have won a game, opponent be damned. That doesn't, however, make the situation any more palatable.

This ended up not being the longest game of the night, but that's pretty much immaterial. Everything about the Mets is terrible right now, and the fact that they're now losing games when Matt Harvey pitches and pitches well is a pretty good example of this. Nobody hits except for John Buck and David Wright (and occasionally Daniel Murphy). The Outfield is so bad that Lucas Duda's middling start is greeted with joy because he's drawing a lot of walks. The bullpen is completely schizophrenic. Usually, the Mets seem to play competitive ball in the first half before they fall apart, but the way things look right now, they stand a very good chance of being irrelevant by Memorial Day. If it wasn't for Harvey and Buck, they could very well be 5-18 right now. Surely a shakeup is needed, but who goes, and how much is it really going to help this bunch?

Your Turn

My other half works a different schedule than I do. Most nights, she will arrive home a couple of hours after I'm home. During Baseball season, this usually means she gets home around the 4th or 5th inning, the 6th if it's a brisk game.

My other half has a battery of TV shows that she likes to watch. Many of them are bunched on the same night. She DVRs all of them, so she can watch them when she gets home. Now, we only have one TV in the house, so as you might imagine, conflicts often occur when I want to watch the Mets game and she wants to watch "Smash."

Most nights, she leaves me alone to watch the game, because she's a nice person. She also will make dinner for herself and look at makeup websites in the interim period. But once she tires of that, she will ask me if the game is over. Monday night, she asked me if the game was over approximately 10 minutes after the game had finished. I told her it was and she mused as to why I didn't come and get her when the game had ended. My assumption was that she could hear Gary Cohen loudly exclaim "And the Ballgame is OVER!" in the next room, but it appears I was mistaken. She may also have not been paying attention. The hypnotic powers of makeup, I suppose.

At this point, I guess you're wondering where the hell I'm going with all this. Well, the point of all this is that on Tuesday Night, she called me as she was leaving work. I told her "I think you can watch your shows early tonight." Thusly, I was not subjected to the final, futile few innings of a debacle of a game. Unfortunately, I'd already witnessed the early part of the game, in which the Phillies beat Dillon Gee like a pinata before he was mercifully removed from the game. I'm often loath to give up the end of a game like that, just in case of a miracle comeback, but ultimately, I see I missed nothing.

(Author's Note: I should mention, in defense of my other half, that I have successfully turned a Philadelphia area gal into a Mets fan in the course of our relationship. That's not to say she was ever a big Phillies fan to begin with, but she has gone from barely being interested in Baseball to following games and even coming with me to Citi Field multiple times over the past two seasons.)