Bizarro Baseball Planet

San Diego has, for many years, kind of flown under the wire for Mets fans as a place where the team traditionally gets sucked into a vortex of bad Baseball, but I think the past two games of this series has been a reminder to us all just how awful a place this is. Never mind the 4-30 record the Mets have had there in the last 10 years. Never mind the spate of 2-1 losses and walk-off Grand Slams. These past two nights haven't held to the standard formula but the formula they have held to is just as irritating to watch.

In these two games, every ground ball the Mets have hit has been directly at a shifted infielder. Every fly ball that seems destined for a double or more has been run down by Jon Jay, or Matt Kemp, or Joe Shemp, or that Sebastian Janikowski Travis Jankowski fellow that comes in late in games. Mets pitchers have seen their mechanics desert them at inopportune times and innings that should have been over extended by bearded ragamuffins or by umpires who suddenly won't pull the trigger on strikes and check swings that are usually universally called the other way. 2-out RBI hits are being given up to batters that have no business getting 2-out hits off of these Mets pitchers. And, of course, games are being saved by Fernando Rodney and his Rally Plantain. Yes, the same Fernando Rodney who seems to get picked off the MLB scrap heap every other season.

It makes sense that all this happens in a ballpark where every out is punctuated by this weird Vietnamese Gong noise.

This isn't like every other stadium where the Mets traditionally have bad luck. For example, Atlanta has been a place where it seems predestined that nothing will go right. In Los Angeles, things only break against the Mets when the Dodgers are on one of their weird voodoo streaks, but in other instances, the Mets can actually do well there. Colorado has that rarefied air so nothing that happens there makes sense. San Diego, all this stuff is like gentle bad luck. It seems like they lull you into this false sense of comfort with the nice weather and cool California attitude and the rebirth of the city itself. The Padres seem to kill you with kindness. They don't destroy the Mets with spirit-crushing blowouts, they just sort of beat you innocuously. Last night, they beat Noah Syndergaard by scoring a run in the 1st, a run in the 5th and that was it, and they weren't even loud runs. Drew Pomeranz beat the Mets by throwing an assortment of curveballs and sliders and off-speed stuff and somehow even though he really had to battle his way through 5 innings, the numbers say he allowed 1 hit and no runs and got a win.

Then, of course, there was the home plate play involving Asdrubal Cabrera, Alexei Ramirez and Derek Norris and it figures Norris was involved since he's the Padres #1 Met Killer, and yes, I realize Teufel was probably just trying to force the Padres to make the play there but it essentially ran them out of an inning. It makes no difference when Derek Norris dropped the ball, and as far as I could tell he dropped it well after the tag was made. So we could have a whole debate on what constitutes a caught ball, I guess? That seems to be kind of fitting for San Diego.

Losing the first two games of this series is hardly inspiring, even if in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make that much of a difference. But if this is how this West Coast trip is going to play out, then we've got some trouble. Hopefully this is just a San Diego thing.

Thud

If you fell asleep early, you probably spared yourself a nice headache, because that's pretty much what I ended up with from watching the Mets play in San Diego.

The Case History for the Mets playing in San Diego, particularly at Petco Park, hasn't been good. Since Petco Park opened in 2004, the Mets have played there I believe about 40 times. In those 40 games, the Mets are, or at least seem to be 6-34, and of those 34 losses, 26 of them were by the score of 2-1. The remainder of them involved some kind of terrible thing happening, like a complete meltdown by the bullpen or a walk-off Grand Slam. 

None of those things happened Thursday night/Friday morning, but things didn't go well for the Mets anyway. This time, the obvious culprit was Jacob deGrom, who was going through some sort of mechanical difficulties throughout his rather laborious 5 innings of work. deGrom's velocity was down, his pitches were up, he wasn't getting anybody out and he seemed to be getting progressively angrier and angrier as the game went on. And things didn't exactly start out well for him to begin with. The first batter for the Padres, Wil Myers, who's one more injury away from bust-dom, took him deep. In the 2nd, he gave up a 2-out RBI single to Colin Rea, the opposing Pitcher, and in the 3rd there was more crap.

That being said, deGrom only left a 3-0 game, which was still in control, or at least it was until the Padres topped off their tank against Logan Verrett in the 6th. Derek Norris, who appears to essentially be another Wilson Ramos (meaning a big, loafy Catcher who hits sporadically but for whatever reason batters the Mets to the tune of an .840 BA) hit a Home Run and something else happened. But the larger issue for the Mets was their inability to hit Rea at all. The Mets made solid contact, but basically everything they hit was into whatever dopey shift the Padres had on, or it was a well-hit fly ball that got run down by Jon Jay, who seems to have materialized with San Diego after essentially being a Mike Matheny All Star for so many years. Rea took a No Hitter into the 7th inning, which is an accomplishment in and of itself considering that Rea is a relative unknown and the Padres have never thrown a No Hitter, a plight we as Mets fans are familiar with but can no longer empathize.

Fortunately, Yoenis Cespedes finally hit a ground ball where a Padre infielder wasn't with 2 outs in the 7th inning and removed that potential stigma from the game. Still, Rea continued to mow down the Mets into the 9th, when they mounted an irritating 3-run rally. I say it's an irritating rally because yes, while it's nice that Granderson homered and Cespedes homered, all it did was just prolong the inevitable: To lose 5-3 instead of 5-0, but lose nonetheless.

At least it wasn't a 2-1 loss with Jay hitting the walk-off Home Run and pogo-sticking his way around the bases. Then again, the Mets still have 3 more games in San Diego. Anything's possible. 

Creeping Upward

Figures that Tuesday night, the night I went, was the hiccup for the Mets.

Wednesday afternoon, the Mets shook off the doledrums of Tuesday's debacle of a game. Though the weather conditions were similar, the Mets went out and bombarded the Braves good and proper, hitting 4 Home Runs in support of Steven Matz, who turned in a sterling 7.2 inning effort as the Mets won the series finale 8-0.

As is usually the case with these afternoon games, I'm in the office and therefore can only sporadically keep up with the proceedings. The game had already started by time I remembered that there was a game, and of course when you're watching on MLB.com's Gamecast there's a limit to what you can grok, but really all you need to know is the score and who's winning. On days like this, I have to just check the score in between tasks, so what I saw was the number on the Mets side creep up from 0, to 2, to 6, and then 8, while the Braves stagnated at 0.

It helped that Matz was pitching like a metronome. It was sort of the anti-Harvey performance. After his initial mess, Matz has been nothing short of brilliant in his subsequent outings and really, against the Braves' lineup, this was a case of simply smashing the flea with a sledgehammer. Matz worked quickly, walked nobody, allowed 2 hits and struck out 8, which is just the sort of outing he should have vs. Atlanta.

Matz was backed by a quartet of Home Runs, all of which came off of Jhoulys Chacin, who generally doesn't allow Home Runs, except that today the Mets just had his number. Rene Rivera, who's sort of filling the Taylor Teagarden role here, belted his first as a Met in the 2nd inning. In the 3rd, Asdrubal Cabrera connected, and then Lucas Duda connected, and later on Duda connected again for a second. By the end of the 5th, there wasn't much more to be said on this end, which is just fine considering that coming into the game, the Mets hadn't scored since the 1st inning on Monday. Sometimes, the minimum necessary works. Other times, it's just good to remind everyone who's in charge here. In this series, the Mets did a little bit of both.

So, the Mets are now done with this easy-ish part of the schedule. Now comes a nice challenge: 11 games in 11 days on the West Coast, and that involves 4 games each in San Diego and Los Angeles. Then, there's 3 games in Colorado, where they either win games 14-9 or lose in 15 innings. Get your coffeemakers out, because there's some late nights coming up. The Mets won't see a division opponent for two weeks, when our friends from Washington come to town.

Shoulda Gone Last Night

On Monday night, the Mets bombed 3 Home Runs in the 1st inning and coasted the rest of the way to an easy win over the Atlanta Braves.

Unfortunately, they haven't scored since. In a wet, miserable affair on Tuesday night, the Mets were completely tied in knots by Matt Wisler while on the other side, Matt Harvey battled his way through yet another troublesome outing and ultimately came undone in a hideous 6th inning that he simply couldn't fight his way out of.

As my Father was wont to say after a game like this, "You shoulda gone last night."

My 5th trip to Citi Field this season had all the makings of a bad time. First of all, it was raining basically the entire night. Not really raining so much as misting, but it was wet and annoying and now that I'm getting older, I don't really enjoy this as much as I used to. It doesn't rain hard enough to stop or even slow down the game, they just play right through it, but I'm sure the players find it about as pleasant as I do. To make matters worse, in spite of the fact that I was sitting basically by myself in section 513, some doofy millennials came up sometime in the middle of the 1st inning and one of them, in spite of rows of empty seats and chatter to the effect of "Oh, let's sit wherever," plopped himself directly in front of me, just enough to block my view of home plate. It took about 4 innings before I got fed up and moved over a section, because really, if they weren't going to take advantage of the myriad empty seats, I would.

Harvey started getting cut by the Braves in the 5th, but really, they'd been dinging him all night. He looked uncomfortable and out of sorts from the outset. They were singling and doubling him to death, and it took some crafty fielding to escape from a 2nd inning jam, where a more formidable opponent might have gone for the kill right there. He was surviving, but not much more than that. And finally, when Mallex Smith reached him for a Home Run that was a Home Run, I didn't need a replay to tell me that, I knew things were just going to go downhill from there. The 6th inning was torturous. Braves were basically flying around the bases at will, Harvey was throwing Wild Pitches and eventually he just dissolved into continually making pickoff throws to 1st base with 2 outs when it was clear the runner wasn't going anywhere. After finally allowing another hit to Smith, Harvey was mercifully pulled from the game after 100 pitches, very few of which looked right.

Meanwhile, the Mets couldn't get an inch off of Wisler, who held them to 1 hit over 8 innings and that was the output of the game. A couple of walks and an Asdrubal Cabrera single that was immediately followed by a Kevin Plawecki DP. The Mets have had trouble with Wisler previously so maybe this shouldn't be too much of a surprise, but come on. Not scoring in 17 of 18 innings against an awful team isn't good. I know that the Mets weren't going to go 19-0 against Atlanta this season, and at some point something like this would happen, but at least save the stinkers for a night when I'm not there watching the misery unfold.

I, Bartolo

Last season, in Atlanta, Bartolo Colon was seen parading around the Mets dugout with a giant bucket of chewing gum, passing it around to teammates with a silly grin on his face.

Last night, in New York, Bartolo Colon was seen parading around the Citi Field mound, shutting down the Atlanta Braves with a silly grin on his face.

Life is good for Bartolo.

Bartolo continues to defy age and logic most times he takes the mound, and once again this was on display in spades last night. In tossing 8 shutout innings against the Atlanta Braves, Colon threw 91 pitches, 84 fastballs and 82 strikes. Yes, I'm pulling those numbers out of the air. But if I told you that straight off, you'd probably believe me, wouldn't you?

The Mets didn't need to generate much offense on this night; in general they probably won't need to against Atlanta, but the 4 runs they scored rather loudly off of Mike Foltynewicz in the 1st inning was enough. Of the first 5 batters against Foltynewicz (who boasts one of my favorite names in Baseball), 3 of them, David Wright, Yoenis Cespedes and Lucas Duda, put the ball in the seats. Colon also put a ball in the seats, granted it was a foul ball, but it was a real good shot and whenever Colon can get around on one like that you have to take notice.

Really, everything was pretty easy for Colon last night from start to finish. I don't know if much more than that needs to be said. It's not always like that for him but when it is, he does it with panache. And chewing gum.