Creeping Upward

Figures that Tuesday night, the night I went, was the hiccup for the Mets.

Wednesday afternoon, the Mets shook off the doledrums of Tuesday's debacle of a game. Though the weather conditions were similar, the Mets went out and bombarded the Braves good and proper, hitting 4 Home Runs in support of Steven Matz, who turned in a sterling 7.2 inning effort as the Mets won the series finale 8-0.

As is usually the case with these afternoon games, I'm in the office and therefore can only sporadically keep up with the proceedings. The game had already started by time I remembered that there was a game, and of course when you're watching on MLB.com's Gamecast there's a limit to what you can grok, but really all you need to know is the score and who's winning. On days like this, I have to just check the score in between tasks, so what I saw was the number on the Mets side creep up from 0, to 2, to 6, and then 8, while the Braves stagnated at 0.

It helped that Matz was pitching like a metronome. It was sort of the anti-Harvey performance. After his initial mess, Matz has been nothing short of brilliant in his subsequent outings and really, against the Braves' lineup, this was a case of simply smashing the flea with a sledgehammer. Matz worked quickly, walked nobody, allowed 2 hits and struck out 8, which is just the sort of outing he should have vs. Atlanta.

Matz was backed by a quartet of Home Runs, all of which came off of Jhoulys Chacin, who generally doesn't allow Home Runs, except that today the Mets just had his number. Rene Rivera, who's sort of filling the Taylor Teagarden role here, belted his first as a Met in the 2nd inning. In the 3rd, Asdrubal Cabrera connected, and then Lucas Duda connected, and later on Duda connected again for a second. By the end of the 5th, there wasn't much more to be said on this end, which is just fine considering that coming into the game, the Mets hadn't scored since the 1st inning on Monday. Sometimes, the minimum necessary works. Other times, it's just good to remind everyone who's in charge here. In this series, the Mets did a little bit of both.

So, the Mets are now done with this easy-ish part of the schedule. Now comes a nice challenge: 11 games in 11 days on the West Coast, and that involves 4 games each in San Diego and Los Angeles. Then, there's 3 games in Colorado, where they either win games 14-9 or lose in 15 innings. Get your coffeemakers out, because there's some late nights coming up. The Mets won't see a division opponent for two weeks, when our friends from Washington come to town.