Oh Dammit

The Mets appear to have been paying Marlin Penance the last two nights after outlasting them in Thursday evening's marathon game. Friday's result was bad enough, but in a vacuum it is of course just one game. Compound that with the results on Saturday night and it feels significantly worse. After Jacob deGrom coolly pistolwhipped the Marlins for seven innings and the Mets bats gave him what should have been a protectable 2-run lead, Fernando Salas shit his pants in the 8th inning, allowing a game-tying Home Run to Hamburgers Yelich and a game-winning Home Run to Mike Stanton and the Mets snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, losing 5-4 to the Marlins.

This is, as always one of those "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" instances for Terry Collins. The haters will of course scream that it was catastrophically stupid to remove deGrom from the game after 97 pitches, in which he'd allowed the Marlins a pair of solo Home Runs sprinkled in between 13 strikeouts. Maybe that's true, but if Collins left him in and deGrom got beaten, then he's an idiot for sticking with his pitcher an inning too long.

The answer? Dammit, I don't know. There is no right answer. You go by feel and Collins felt like deGrom was done. I trust him enough at this point to know the temperature of his players. Frankie Bag-o-donuts in Hicksville is going from his gut, and his gut's been telling him "BACKMAN, BABAY!!!" for the last 4 years, and so Collins is a moron and needs to go. Tonight, Collins was wrong and so it's a field day for Frankie and his ilk. For me, it's just the irritation of seeing Dee Gordon pogo-sticking around the infield—typical Marlin behavior. I don't particularly care enough about a right or wrong move when it's essentially a judgement call. What I do know is that this is the Marlins, and invariably they're going to pull some dumb shit out of their ass against the Mets multiple times in a season. This happens to be one of those times. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise and they'll get their Marlinness out of their system early, so that the Mets can handle them the way they should be handled later in the season. Again, I don't know. But right now the only thing that's managed to get in the Mets way so far this season is the Marlins and I've had enough of this.