Ill-Timed Blues

Were the Mets in a more precarious position, and were the team that's in pursuit of them possessive of more intestinal fortitude, maybe I might get more worked up about this homestand that's now mercifully ended. After playing dominant baseball at Citi Field for the first half of the season, the Mets have slowed their roll at home, and this has culminated in what was by far and away their worst homestand of the season, where they won 3 of 9 games, and yes, three of them were the stupid Subway Series games, but the other 6 were against teams they really should have handled, and they didn't.

I still can't realistically slip into panic mode here, if only because while the Mets have had issues over the past week, Washington has shown no signs of breaking through the door the Mets have ever-so-slightly left open for them. While the Mets were slogging through their game against Atlanta, the Nationals were trying to ride Max Scherzer to the death against Baltimore and ultimately Scherzer bit the dust first, allowing a backbreaking Home Run to Manny Machado on his 122nd pitch of the night. Thus, for the second night in a row, while the Mets looked really lousy against a really lousy team, their poor play was of no consequence as they lost no ground, and knocked two more digits off their magic number.

That being said, it's still not so great to see the Mets playing so poorly at this time of year. Yes, teams will run hot and cold and quite honestly, the Mets were on an unsustainable hot streak. Much like at the beginning of the season, when they ran off 11 wins in a row and looked like the best team in Baseball, they eventually fell back to Earth and regressed to the mean. When they played half asleep for two months, they also weren't quite as bad as they looked. The truth lies somewhere in between. No team is immune; the Cardinals and Royals have looked pretty bad over the last week or two as well and they're both cruising into the Postseason.

Still, you'd rather see the Mets play better at home against a dead team, and it's kind of annoying when their best player, who granted has killed the Mets a thousand times (as opposed to the ten thousand times Larry stuck it to us), comes off the bench and basically singlehandedly beats the Mets. I've had no shortage of unkind things to say about Freddie Freeman (although for what it's worth everything I've read is that he's a lovely person) you can't say he's thrown in the towel. But what he did last night was truly absurd and really shouldn't have been allowed to happen. But it did.

So, the Mets now go on the road for their final road trip of the season, and actually this is probably a good thing for the Mets right now. For whatever reason they have this weird thing at home sometimes (and even with that thing this is their most successful season at Citi Field to date) and going on the road seems to help them clear their heads and band together. Who knows.