In Regulation Time!

The Mets and Phillies concluded their more-than-5 game series on Monday night with a rarity: a real, live 9-inning game!

Where the weekend was punctuated by a flurry of fine pitching combined with a general lack of hitting, be it clutch or otherwise, Monday night saw the Mets ride Bartolo Colon's second consecutive fine performance, a pair of fine defensive plays from Matt den Dekker, and a 6-RBI game from Wilmer Flores to remove any need for extra innings from this particular affair, winning an 11-2 rout of a game going away.

Much like the other games in this series, there was some sort of odd activity that drew me away from actually getting to see most of the game, which was unfortunate, because I got to see the first few innings, got to see Lucas Duda drive home the game's first run, got to see den Dekker take a Home Run away from Ryan Howard and then throw out Reid Brignac at the plate by a Lagares-like margin...and that was about it. The rest of the game was relayed to me by a variety of buzzes on my phone, so I missed the Wilmer Flores experience and other assorted niceties that the Mets managed to pull off in this rare laugher of a game.

While Colon kept the Phillies in check for a majority of the evening, the Mets set out against Fausto Carmona Roberto Hernandez once again, in what feels like the 8th time they've faced him this season. Hernandez, who's sort of been the catch-all guy for the Phillies, is a mere shell of the guy who once won 19 games under his assumed name in Cleveland, and now seems to have dissolved into some weird, hybrid Jose Contreras/Pete Harnisch-like journeyman who continues to get a job based on a level of talent that he's probably not capable of living up to any longer. But, then again, that may be why he resurfaced with the Phillies, a team of aging, leaky veterans that are either in the last vestiges of their prime or never had a prime to begin with. The glory years for this group are done, clearly, and nothing is more indicative of that then the fact that the Mets walked into their stadium and pretty much cleaned their clocks, winning 4 of the 5 games and by all rights could very easily have won the 5th.

However, on the other side of the equation, while the Mets won 4 of 5, it took them 14 innings and 11 innings to get two of those 4, and another 14 innings to take the loss. So, who's really coming out ahead here?