Turning In Early

I mean, I'd like to go into games feeling a little more confident, and when you come into a game and tell me that the pitching matchup is Jacob deGrom against Dillon Gee, I feel like the smart money is on deGrom. Dillon Gee left here rather ignominiously two years ago and hasn't really found a toehold since then, and I mean I wish him well since he toiled reasonably well here in some generally hopeless situations but, you know, it's Dillon Gee. And, well, the Mets are still in a hopeless situation without him.

Neither Gee or deGrom pitched anything resembling well on Tuesday in Texas, where the Mets haven't visited since...well, I'm not sure, but it's Texas and it's the Summer and the ball was just flying out of the park to the tune of there being 7 Home Runs for the game, and 5 of them were hit by the Mets...and yet the Mets still figured out a way to lose the game, 10-8.

I was actually around on time for this, because I guess life has better geared me for 8:10pm games, and the Mets hit Dillon Gee early and often, but the problem was that deGrom basically handed those runs back to the Rangers almost immediately, and so 1-0 Mets became 2-1 Rangers, and 3-2 Mets became 4-3 Rangers, and so on and so forth until somehow it became 8-4 Rangers, and deGrom was getting some desultory pep talk from Terry Collins, and Texas had put in a pitcher with the uncomfortable name of Austin Bibens-Dirkx, whom the Mets couldn't figure out.

Later, and I mean much later because it was the 4th inning at close to 10pm, I was fading. Josh Smoker had come in and thrown gasoline on an already-smoldering fire, and at 10-4 there was a Neil Ramirez sighting, and the best thing I was able to come up with at that point was some weird assertion that Ramirez bears a striking resemblance to halcyon Montreal Expos mascot Youppi!

When the Mets got some runners on in the 8th and failed to make the score anything closer than 10-5, I decided I'd had enough. It was late, I was tired and the game was done, so I shut it off. Some time passed and I figured I'd get some kind of buzz on my phone that the game had ended, but it hadn't come, so I checked in on Gamecast and was surprised to see that the Mets had cut the deficit to 10-8 and had men on base...and then of course the dreaded "In play, Outs" line popped up, Jay Bruce hit into that Double Play, and the game was done.

So, you know, I didn't miss that much after all. In fact, maybe I spared myself an extra 40 minutes or so of misery.