Veryverybad

So, after two nights of actually getting to see the Mets play and being wholly dissatisfied by what I saw, I got to follow along with yesterday's action on my office computer screen, which isn't really useful since, you know, I actually have to work at work and therefore have no particular idea what's going on at any given moment. But, given the way things turned out, I didn't really miss anything of consequence. Although the Mets raced out to an early lead thanks to a pair of rare Home Runs by Anthony Recker and another Home Run by Wilmer Flores, the Mets came completely unglued in the 5th inning and ended up blowing their lead, losing the game and coming away from their 4-game series against the Darling Cubs with no wins to speak of.

Things certainly started off wonderfully. The Mets reached Travis Wood, as they've done in the past, and Jon Niese was humming right along and for a while there it seemed like the Mets were going to salvage this Chicago mess from total humiliation and bring in a victory. They were hitting, for one, which is something they hadn't done in any other game this series. Aside from the trio of Home Runs, even John Mayberry Jr chipped in with a 2-run single as the Mets built a 5-1 lead. But then came the Bottom of the 5th, and then came the roof caving in on Niese, as a Flores Error opened the floodgates and created one of my least favorite Met "things," the Jon Niese inning. Matt Szczur had already set the stage for the inning by driving home a run, but had Flores made a clean throw on an eminently easy Addison Russell ground ball, the Mets probably would have survived the inning unscathed. Instead, he threw the ball away, Szczur scored and then you could basically just take a bite out of the game. Everything went down the toilet and it was pretty much just a matter of time before the Cubs scored the winning run since the offense stopped, and when Hansel Robles wild pitched home Anthony Recker couldn't handle a Robles pitch (shows how much attention I was paying) in the 7th plated Dexter Fowler, the Cubs had their winning run.

Basically, a loss is a loss is a loss and right now the Mets are falling right back into this lousy pattern that we were all kind of hoping they'd gotten past. They get off to a hot start, and then regress back to the mean, and then the mean gets on top of them, which means that 13-3 is now 20-15 (or, 7-12), and they either get great pitching performances and don't hit, and lose the game, or you get what happened today, which is they hit, but get some ill-timed screwup and everything falls apart from there.

Now, the Mets come back home, where they'll see even more NL Central teams, starting with the Brewers, who look old and boring, and then the Cardinals come in for 4 games, and if they don't get their act together by then, this whole thing could start looking really ugly real quick.