It took one more night of the Mets getting their not hitting out of their system, which they did to a tee on Friday night, but Saturday was a vastly different story. The 14 runs they hung on the Brewers, to the delight of a fedora-waving crowd represented basically the total amount of runs they'd scored in the last 14 days squashed into one 9-inning bucket of fun.
This sudden and quite welcome outburst came after a lifeless Friday night affair where Bartolo Colon for the first time all season didn't have it and got jumped on for multiple Home Runs and the mostly moribund Brewers rode the pitching of Kyle Lohse and stuck it in the Mets ear, 7-0. This game, another that I fortunately didn't watch, struck me as the kind of game that was over before most of the crowd had even made it to their seats, and had I been in attendance and had I been running late, I might have turned around at the gate and gone back home (but not really—that goes against my religion). A more depressing scenario I cannot imagine.
Saturday was the exact opposite. After some middling performances, Jacob deGrom got his act together, which was the first necessary step to victory. Not only did he do so on the mound, where he spun 6 solid innings, but also at the plate, where he picked up 3 hits. He did so while batting 8th in the lineup, and not only was he hitting 8th, but his counterpart Matt Garza was as well. The whole batting the Pitcher 8th thing seems to be becoming vogue now in the National League, much to my chagrin, not because I have a particular dislike for the strategy, but because it means that people are going to kiss Tony LaRussa's pompous ass even more. But I digress. deGrom and Garza batting 8th put the indignity of hitting 9th on Rookie Luis Sardinas, making his season debut for Milwaukee, and Wilmer Flores, who for all his foibles in the field actually leads the Mets in Home Runs.
Clearly Flores took the slight to heart, since his 4th inning Grand Slam turned a 2-0 Mets lead into a much more comfortable 6-0. But the Mets were just getting warmed up in the 4th. They re-loaded the bases immediately, and Michael Cuddyer, Daniel Murphy and Eric Campbell summarily drove all the runs home and before you knew what was going on, 10 runs had scored and the Mets had blown the doors off of Garza and his hapless replacement Brandon Kintzler to open up an 11-0 lead. Later, Kevin Plawecki and Curtis Granderson added Home Runs, because on this night, why not (although I'm sure everyone was probably yelling to save it for the next game), and in the end the Mets finished off with season highs for runs and hits and general good vibes.
So, yes. This team does have some offensive life in it, although yes, perhaps it is better to spread things around a little bit. But maybe they're starting to get their act back together a little bit, what with Washington now right up their asses.
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