Cure For The Common Mets

Well, in a game where Bartolo Colon manages to get a hit, advance on a sacrifice fly and leave with a lead, the Mets ought to win the game. Lately, that hasn't necessarily been the case, but when the Mets are playing a team even more moribund than they've looked at times, some liberties can be taken. In yet another game that's a mystery to me because I was out of the house all day, the Mets rode Colon's offense and a troika of Home Runs to a 6-3 victory over the Phillies to right the ship after being ambushed in Ye Pittsburghe over the weekend.

After a pair of patently lousy outings over the last two weeks, Colon rebounded with a cleaner outing on Monday afternoon in front of a festive Holiday crowd. He still walked two batters—including his mound opponent Severino Gonzalez—and gave up a pair of run-scoring hits to his age counterparts Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, but his 6 innings were generally clean, and included 6 strikeouts mixed in with 6 hits and 3 runs. Not a great outing, but good enough that he gave the Mets a chance to win.

The Mets managed two Home Runs off of Gonzalez early in the game, one from Lucas Duda and one from Michael Cuddyer, who feels like he hasn't hit one out in about a month (Duda, on the other hand, just hits everything on a regular basis now—who saw that coming?). But the Mets didn't grab the lead for good until the bottom of the 6th, when Wilmer Flores sailed a pitch from Elvis Araujo into the seats for his 7th of the year, a 3-run shot.

Flores, who's obviously drawn a great deal of criticism lately for his defensive deficiencies, has still hit respectably in spite of that, and at this point it's actually beginning to seem like it doesn't matter what he does with the bat, people are just going to focus on his defense and think he needs to be traded for Troy Tulowitzki. I contend that these are the same people who continue to scream that Wally Backman needs to be the Manager (people are amazingly still carrying this torch), Daniel Murphy is still that loveable kid who needs time to figure it out and the Wilpons will sell the team to a consortium of schmucks that bought a billboard. But I digress. Flores sucks, but currently, he leads the Mets with his 7 Home Runs, most of which have come at Citi Field, and to make matters worse, Flores actually leads all Major League Shortstops in Home Runs. He also hasn't made an error in about a week and a half, for what it's worth. But what the hell do I know.

This upcoming stretch of games the Mets have against some bottom feeders now comes at an opportune time, because maybe the Mets can start to get a little healthy while picking up some cheap Ws in the process and get themselves back above water a little more. The past few weeks have been ugly. If they get their acts together, the next few weeks should hopefully be less so.