Deserving Fate

Going through this season to this point, I guess, what, 60 games in, has been kind of a chore. That's what happens when you come in pretty well convinced that this team is going to break through and find the greatness that they've been chasing for 31 years now...and then the bell rings and the whole thing just falls flat. The Mets ran out to 7-3 and since then the whole story has been win 1, lose 2, win 1, lose 3, win 2, lose 3 more. But Friday night's game in Atlanta was one of those games that, in my younger, angrier days might have just thrown me over the edge.

You can basically blow through the 1st 8 1/2 innings in a few sentences. Matt Harvey was OK. Not great, just OK, and managed to make it through his start not allowing any runs. Unfortunately, because he threw so many pitches—I mean, what else is new—that start only lasted 5 innings. Curtis Granderson hit a Home Run and the Mets led 1-0, and that lasted all the way to the next inning, when Paul Sewald came in, gave up a couple of hits and got Dansby Swanson'ed when Swanson doubled home two runs to give the Braves the lead. The Mets tied it on an out-of-nowhere Home Run from Travis d'Arnaud and thus it was tied into the bottom of the 9th.

Fernando Salas was in after having pitched a reasonably quiet 8th, and with 1 out, here was Swanson again, and at this point the game basically turned into a microcosm of the entire Mets season. You know, Swanson hasn't had a great season but that should hold little bearing on anything because he tattooed the Mets up real good late last year and I expect we'll see more of that. So Swanson hits one up the middle, and really this should be a single probably 100 times out of 100. And there's Curtis Granderson, moving after the ball with no particular sense of urgency, like he's going for another helping at the clubhouse buffet. So Swanson takes off for second and makes it, and not only does he make it, he makes it easily. So already, I'm incensed. Never mind the "maybe a Shortstop with better range makes the play" argument, because I'm not worried about that. Curtis Granderson played that ball like an asshole, and Swanson promptly made him look like an asshole. One pitch later, the game was over when Rio Ruiz singled through the hole where Cabrera probably would have been if Swanson had properly been on 1st, and Swanson scored and the Braves had a veritable Marlins party on the Infield. Probably because they all knew that they just stole this game from under the noses of a team that's totally fucking asleep right now. You could have seen Ruiz's single coming a mile away. Doesn't matter if Conforto didn't have a handle on the ball. He wasn't throwing out Swanson anyway.

I don't often outwardly think that the Mets deserve to lose games, but the Mets deserved to lose that game. They played like a bunch of assholes and they should feel like assholes. Sometimes, humiliation can be a good thing and if the first two months of this season wasn't bad enough, maybe a game like this will wake them up. The Mets, even in their neutered state, should be feeding the Braves their lunch. Instead, they're standing around with their thumbs up their asses while opposing players circle the bases at will. This isn't a Manager thing and it's not as though Granderson's the only culprit here because you see it in bits and pieces constantly. It seems like an annual thing, actually, that the Mets go into Atlanta in June and it seems like that Atlanta air just sucks the life out of them, and they look slow and tired and that sun is beating down on them and they get swept. A sweep wouldn't surprise me at this point.