The Long Road Back

Q: How will you remember your breakout 2012 season?

Colin Kaepernick: As not being good enough. 

It's been 7 rather long months since the 49ers walked off the carpet of the Louisiana Superdome after a 34-31 Super Bowl defeat at the hands of the Baltimore Ravens. To say that that defeat has stung this team and all of their fans would be an understatement. Thinking about that game for me is akin to, say, thinking about Game 6 in '99. After an uneven, mistake-filled 1st half, the 49ers got it together, rallied, and almost pulled off the comeback of comebacks. But, we know what happened. They got within 5 yards of the goal, but no closer. The 49ers were probably the better team on the field that day, but the Ravens played the better game. Sometimes, that's all that matters.

You try to take the silver linings from these games and file them away as much as possible. Maybe it's because I follow the 49ers so much, and so I pay more attention to it, but it's rare that the team that loses the Super Bowl emerges with higher regard than the team that won. Sure, everyone will be gunning for the Ravens this season, and everyone will be gunning for the 49ers as well. But when you consider everyone's short list of Super Bowl contenders this season, the 49ers are at or near the top every time. And nobody has been drawing attention quite as much as Colin Kaepernick, who, believe it or not, will enter his first full season as the starting Quarterback this weekend.

Throughout the Baseball season, when I would pause for a moment and think about the 49ers, I often considered the similarities between Colin Kaepernick and our own Matt Harvey. Certainly, their backgrounds differ quite a bit, although Kaepernick was in fact the property of the Chicago Cubs, where he was at one time a pitching prospect. But it's less a matter of them both being well-built physical specimens who can hurl their respective axes through a brick wall with astonishing accuracy. I think more about the manner in which they each burst onto the scene. I think about the attitude, the way they carry themselves, and their work ethic. These are two individuals that appear mostly impervious to the media crush and the glare of stardom. Colin Kaepernick's 10th career start as an NFL Quarterback was in the Super Bowl. Matt Harvey had been in the Major Leagues 2 weeks shy of a calendar year before starting the All Star Game. Both players spent large swaths of their respective offseasons working out and honing their craft. For Kaepernick, this meant meeting with several of his receivers in Atlanta 2 weeks following the Super Bowl for workouts. It meant training with Olympic track athletes. It went beyond simply Football. Harvey was known to go out and throw bullpens at Citi Field in early January. Beyond Baseball. You can tell by the way they speak in interviews. Kaepernick shouldered much of the blame for the Super Bowl himself, feeling he made too many early mistakes to recover from. Harvey often spoke of his desire to maximize his efficiency to pitch deeper into games. But in each case, they've backed up their talk with performance. I said at the time, and I still believe that Kaepernick's performance in the Super Bowl was heroic. He dragged the 49ers kicking and screaming back into the game, threw for over 300 yards and damn near pulled off the comeback to win it. Harvey hasn't had the opportunity to perform on quite that bright a stage as yet, but certainly the 3 times he's taken No Hitters into the 7th inning speaks for itself.

But if there's a cautionary tale to this comparison, it's that it's all very fragile. Just as Harvey's brilliant season was winding down, he was felled by an arm injury, the severity of which could knock him out until 2015. Kaepernick has certainly managed to avoid injuries, but his style of play leaves him susceptible to something freaky happening. But it's not just Kaepernick who has to worry about the specter of injuries. The 49ers have already been bitten by the injury bug far more often than they had been in recent years. Michael Crabtree, for one, was felled by an achilles injury that leaves his season in doubt. Other players like Mario Manningham, LaMichael James and Patrick Willis are also ailing. In Manningham's case, he's still recovering from a knee injury he suffered last season.

The NFL is an odd bird, though. Teams can go off the track for a variety of reasons. It may not be the potential injuries that could derail Kaepernick. It could simply be the fragility of the NFL season. I've mentioned it in the past, but the NFL season is a weird beast that comes and goes like a blur. There's but 16 games to prove you're good enough to compete for the big prize, and it not only takes talent, but it takes good breaks and the skill to know how to overcome the bad ones. It takes getting hot at the right time. It takes keeping one step ahead of the competition, knowing how to always beat them to the punch and striking before they can strike you. That's what the 49ers are facing as they attempt to get back to the Super Bowl.

Some of the faces have changed this time around. Last season, the 49ers returned all 11 of their defensive starters. This year, only 9 return. Another peril of today's NFL is that the rosters of winning teams are regularly poached of key players. Gone are valuable contributors like Dashon Goldson, Delanie Walker and Ted Ginn. David Akers and Alex Smith are also gone. They've been replaced, but it remains to be seen how these new pieces will fit in. Replacing Goldson, for example, is Rookie Eric Reid. Top to bottom, the 49ers will likely be a great team once again, but many feel that they may not even be the best team in their own division. The Seattle Seahawks, the Hot Team that kicked the 49ers in the face late last season, with their irksome coach and amphetamine addicted defense, have become everyone's chic pick. Many publications I've read have picked the Seahawks to go all the way to the Super Bowl, beating the 49ers in the playoffs along the way. In fact, their Quarterback, Russell Wilson, has been lumped in with Kaepernick as "The Next Generation" of the NFL. The two meetings these teams will have are certainly must-watch games (and they've developed a real Mets/Phillies-style shit-talking hatred for each other). Other teams like the Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Washington Redskins, New York Giants, and Sunday's opponent, the Green Bay Packers will also be gunning for the 49ers. The road is not going to be easy. We already learned that last year, when the 49ers lost some puzzling, frustrating games and lacked consistency through much of the regular season. This season will probably be even tougher, considering how close the 49ers came, and just how tough it is to get all the way back.

If they can get all the way back.

Salvage The Day!

See?! Everyone can be cool every once in a while.

After two days of basically being stomped on by the Braves, the Mets fought back a little bit and won in what is mercifully their final game against Atlanta for the season. The schedule says they only played the Braves 19 times, although I swear it felt like they played about 66, particularly after the All Star Break.

It was another radio special in the office today, and last year, I'd mentioned that a game on the radio and R.A. Dickey on the mound almost always ended up a winning combination. This year, the combo seems to be the radio and Dillon Gee. This may not be true at all, but it just seems like every time there's an office radio day and Dillon Gee on the mound, the Mets have come up roses.

Today, in particular, was one of those games, as the Mets came out firing early and often and never looked back in a 5-2 victory that actually felt more like a blowout victory than it actually was. Andrew Brown homered early and even Lucas Duda ran into a fastball for one of his own to stake Gee to a lead, and Gee just ran with it from there. He was up to the task of getting out of early trouble, striking out a pair with men on 2nd and 3rd in the 1st inning, which set the tone for his day, as Atlanta barely made a peep against him for 7 innings. Gee even helped his own cause with a floating single that neither Meathead Gattis nor Fredo Upton made any particular effort to catch, causing Howie Rose to state, with exasperation, "The Braves look like they have no interest in playing a ballgame today!" 

And yet, for as much as it felt like a runaway, the game was a wayward Vic Black pitch away from being a squeaker in the 8th. Black motored through the first two batters before Freddie Freeman, who may as well just start wearing uniform #10 or start making snide comments in a half-drunk Florida drawl about Mets fans putting on Yankees gear, because that's pretty much who he's turning into, caught up to him, and then Gattis was aboard, and it was a little hairy for a second because Gerald Laird battled, but eventually popped out. Then I went to the bank, and by time I returned, the game was over.

So, the Mets are finally done with these clowns for 2013, although rest assured I'll continue hating them for as long as their season is going. I will be rooting against them in the playoffs, particularly when everyone starts brown-nosing them as they get bounced in the 1st round again. But that's another story for another time. Next, the Mets go off to visit my relatives in Cleveland, a place they last visited in 2010 with positive results.

Spoiled

After winning the first two games in Washington last weekend, I had a bright thought percolating about how the Mets could be the spoiler going down the stretch if they continued to play well, and they could give some good teams a hard time, and maybe throw a wrench into the playoff hopes of certain teams...And then Sunday night happened and the Mets just went from spoiler to spoiled in the matter of an inning, because since the 8th inning Sunday night, the Mets have yet to wake up and fight back. Monday was an embarrassment of ineptitude and Tuesday was somewhat more of the same, even if for a while the Mets looked like they might be able to pull themselves out of it.

The game tonight was eerily reminiscent of Dillon Gee's ill-fated outing in June, which you probably missed unless you're as ridiculous as I am and stayed up until 1am to see the horrible ending. Carlos Torres, who has acquitted himself reasonably well while basically being a warm body to eat some innings, put forth a strong outing through 6 innings which is all well and good except that, of course, Major League Baseball games are 9 innings long and the Mets aren't very good. By this I mean that it took every ounce of the first 6 and a half innings for the Mets to plate a run, and it took some aggressive baserunning from Eric Young, Jr, who pimped out a triple that was followed by an RBI double from Daniel Murphy in order to accomplish said run. Unfortunately, the Braves took advantage of their remaining turns at bat and opportunistically had a pair of their most obscenely irritating players bash Home Runs off of Torres. After that outburst, the Braves led 3-1 and the Mets had no particular response other than to get some runners on base and leave them there.

You knew it was coming. You knew Torres was only going to keep them down for so long. But you just hoped that the Mets could squeeze one more inning out of him, and of course, it was that one inning that everything blew up on him. The upshot of all this, if there is an upshot to be had, is that the Braves scored in the 7th inning instead of waiting until the 9th inning, which would have just turned the knife a little more.

So, one final game in Atlanta tomorrow afternoon. Thank God. I've had enough of the Braves for a lifetime at this point. 

Nap Time!

I sort of had a bad feeling about today's Met Massacre in Atlanta before the game even started. Sometimes you know when circumstances are about to conspire to sink your ballclub. The Mets had arrived in Atlanta at sometime around 4am Monday Morning, where they had little opportunity to get any sleep before arriving at our favorite place, Turner Field, for a 1pm game. That Daisuke Matsuzaka, who was slated to start, went ahead and did get some sleep was of little solace; his miserable pace appeared more likely to put his groggy teammates to sleep rather than provide a jolt.

This was bad enough, but the Mets also puked up a lead to the Nationals on Sunday night. Jonathon Niese, though not as sharp as he was against Philly, pitched well, but was forced from the game due to leg cramps in the 6th inning (and seeing him walk off with the trainer before anyone knew what the hell was going on probably sent more than a few Met fans down the dispensary). The bullpen, and on this night it was Scott Atchison, Scott Rice and Gonzalez Germen, then frittered away a 5-2 lead, as the Nationals kept pecking and scraping before finally getting the key hit from, who else, Jayson Werth. The end result was a 6-5 loss in a game the Mets probably should have won, and while taking 2 of 3 is nice, I would have preferred to sweep the Nationals and kick them in the nuts. Instead, the Nationals won, and all the talk was about the "gritty gutty Nationals" and how this could be the springboard they need to get back into the Wildcard race. And, of course, the Mets were left to carry around the stink from this loss straight from the ballpark to the airplane to Atlanta, where they had an approximately 13 1/2 hour turnaround before playing today.

Needless to say, the results this afternoon were not good.

This was pretty much a disaster from the outset. Matsuzaka, who I'm convinced has nothing left, was just as putrid as he was against Philadelphia, and the Braves jumped on him for long hit after long hit, running up 6 runs in 2 innings as he continued to work at a snail's pace. Paul Maholm for the Braves was no better pace-wise, but he at least got some outs. The end result was that by time Matsuzaka was mercifully lifted after the 3rd inning, the game was already nearing 90 minutes old, an appallingly long time for 3 innings worth of play.

Things didn't improve much for the Mets from there. They tried to claw their way back into the game, but realistically, they didn't have much of a chance. They got some hits from Zach Lutz, who has resurfaced to be the boring right handed guy off the bench (Andrew Brown has proven himself too useful of late), and Daniel Murphy (whose hot streak probably has another 2 days left before he goes back to hitting .248), but when they needed a big hit that would really make this a respectable game, it didn't happen, and instead the Mets just loafed through the game looking like they needed a nap while Atlanta kept tacking on runs. Gonzalez Germen and David Aardsma took the brunt of this beating, although outside of the recently resurfaced Tim Byrdak and the recently acquired Vic Black, nobody pitched especially well today.

Towards the end of this debacle, another mess of a game that took over 3 and a half hours to wrap up, Gary and Ron kept talking about the silver linings from the game, and how it was great to see Tim Byrdak back, and to see Vic Black come in and get a key out, and Zach Lutz got a big hit, but how important were these things? The Mets lost by 8 runs and none of these three particular things would have prevented that from happening. In fact, I think it's safe to say that 2 of these 3 guys likely won't have a job with the Mets after this season (well, unless the Mets really want a second lefty specialist). But, then again, you take what little positive you can in games like this. I suppose there's not much else that they can be expected to do. Except, perhaps, go back to the hotel and get some sleep.

Further Continued Improvement

The Mets battered Washington and Dan Haren last night with the kind of attack that that has served them well, at least on nights when they've been able to generate lots of runs (which has, of course, been rare). Basically, they vultured Haren to death with a barrage of singles and doubles coming from just about every source. By time Haren departed with 2 out in the 3rd, he'd allowed hits to 9 of 12 batters, and 7 of them would end up scoring. The Mets led 8-0 after 3 innings and cruised the rest of the way to an 11-3 victory, thereby giving them a series win against a Washington team desperately trying to keep a slim chance at a Wildcard spot alive.

This outburst of offense came in support of Zack Wheeler, who continues to look great. I talked yesterday about how Dillon Gee has looked better and better as the season has gone on, and the same could be said of Wheeler, and probably even moreso.

It was expected that Wheeler, who lacked the overall polish and general attitude that his cohort Matt Harvey possessed, would take his lumps a bit more often than Harvey. And he has. He's had some outings that weren't very good at all, but rather than that being the norm, Wheeler has continued to improve to the point where it's almost expected that the Mets will get a good 6 solid innings out of him every time out. Last night was no different; given a big lead, Wheeler settled in and kept right on mowing down Nationals batters, allowing only 2 runs on 4 hits in his 6.2 innings. The 2 runs appeared to have been more of a hiccup than anything else.

Wheeler's been pulled rather randomly his last two outings, with 2 outs in the 7th inning, primarily due to pitch count and, more likely, the Mets reactionary nature to the Matt Harvey injury. Wheeler hasn't been too pleased about it, but better safe than sorry, I suppose. Wheeler has talked, of late, about being tired as the season wears on and he reaches his innings limit. I would suppose, though I'm not sure, that he's got 3-4 starts left in his season and then the Mets will shut him down. It would be nice to see him get to 10 wins before he's done, which is certainly possible given that last night's win was his 7th in 14 starts, a nice number and overall, the Mets have gone 10-4 in his starts. So even when he's not winning, he's leaving the Mets in position to win a game, which is probably more telling of the quality of his outings.

Point here is, even if the Mets lose Harvey for all of 2014, and we still won't know that for a few weeks at best, the Mets do remain in relatively good hands going forward. Wheeler's got what it takes to be successful at this level. And behind him, there are still some quality arms to keep things afloat.

Another one of those quality arms is on the mound tonight in Jonathon Niese, as the Mets make an asinine appearance on The Biggest Game In The Galaxy before a late-night trip to Good Ol' Atlanty to play an Afternoon game tomorrow.