Settle Down, Beavis

This afternoon's game, surprise surprise, was one I didn't watch. But as it was the 12:10pm "Summer Camp Special," which I believe has also been known in past seasons as "Senior Citizen's Day," or "The Businessman's Special," I was at least able to follow the early portion of the game on my lunch break...you know, on Gamecast at my desk. But as far as I could tell, the game turned on two pitches in the top of the first. With two outs and men on 1st and 3rd, Rafael Montero had 2 strikes on Joey Gallo, who is essentially a feast or famine hitter on the level of Rob Deer or Dave Kingman. But Montero balked to bring home a run. He then laid an absolute meatball in to Gallo who promptly hit it out for a Home Run. Just like that it was 3-0 and that was pretty much the game right there. The Mets managed a Wilmer Flores Home Run off of Martin Perez and lost 5-1.

The more interesting Mets news came later this evening when news broke of the Jay Bruce trade to Cleveland for an A-ball pitcher. I have no issue dealing Bruce and although the return is underwhelming, it's something, and that's all you can ask for given that there just wasn't a great deal of interest in him. Of course this has brought out all sorts of Idiot Mets Fans out of the woodwork screaming about "stoopid sandy and corny collins gotta go" and "here we go another seven years of losing." One particular nutjob went so far as to suggest that the reason Alderson didn't deal Bruce to the Yankees for a supposedly "Better package" is because the Mets are bitter that they're failing and the Yankees are having a good season. I wonder how many of these people actually pay attention to the moves Collins makes, or if they're even Mets fans because the way they behave I sometimes feel like they're trolls that were sent by the Yankees just to piss us off. You can blame Alderson at times for inactivity, but I've been watching him for seven seasons now and there has not been a single trade made that didn't come to serve some greater purpose. It's as though these people are yearning for the days of Omar Minaya, who would react to any minor adversity by babbling and making short-sighted, unnecessary trades. Bruce is going to be a Free Agent and probably wasn't going to be back anyway, I mean, sure, the Mets could use the offense but to what end? To help them finish in 3rd place instead of 4th? It's the old adage of "We're losing with you, we can lose without you," and so it seems to me there is no loss in this deal.

Then again, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by the Idiot Mets Fans. These are the same people that continue to crow for Wally Backman (who by the way still does not have a Major League managing position) and think the soul of the team left with Daniel Murphy, who was a great player for all those years. It's kind of like listening to the rhetoric of people who support the current Presidential administration. Sometimes I'm not sure what fans expect the team to do. This season is lost. We just have to try and make the best of what's left because I much prefer Baseball Summers to Winter and no Baseball.

It Still Doesn't Work, Stupid

So if, after one game, Terry Collins' innovative and experimental strategy to jump start the lineup by  batting his pitcher 8th didn't work, yeah, why not try it again?

I think everyone probably feels about as exasparated as Jon Niese looks in the above photo.

Niese did about as much as he could to try to keep the Cardinals at bay last night, but he was done in by some long hits in the 5th inning, and a betrayal by his defense (specifically Daniel Murphy, who made one of his trademark Daniel Murphy errors that serves to remind everyone that for all he does, he's still Daniel Murphy) in the 6th inning, and the end result was that he took the loss. Not that he deserved it, but that's the game. You pitch well and often don't reap the benefits. Especially when you're a Met.

In support of his general yeoman's work, the innovative and experimental Mets lineup generated 2 runs, both of them coming on Home Runs. The first one came from David Wright when the game was meaningful. The second came from Lucas Duda, in the trademark Lucas Duda Home Run situation: a 5-1 game in the 9th inning. The rest of the Mets lineup, from 9th place hitter Eric Young Jr, to leadoff hitter Curtis Granderson did very little against Michael Wacha, or any of the other pitchers the Cardinals threw out the Mets. 

The point is, this team can't hit no matter where the pitcher hits in the batting order, and trying to shake things up by shuffling the same crap around the batting order doesn't help anything. The problem here is that there's no punch. d'Arnaud didn't hit in the Majors and now he's back in AAA, where he's promptly hit .450 with 5 Home Runs in about a week, Juan Lagares is on the DL and nobody among Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Matt den Dekker and Eric Young Jr have proven themselves to be especially adequate, and, of course, there's the train wreck that is Chris Young, and these guys playing on an every day basis leads to what we've basically seen over the past month: No Damn Good. Being experimental and innovative isn't going to help the situation.

Innovative and Experimental!

I guess it's somewhat fitting that in the house that Tony LaRussa's massive ego built, Terry Collins would try to jump-start a lifeless lineup by paying homage to the legend-in-his-own-mind that LaRussa was and shake up his lineup. And by shake up his lineup, I mean bat his pitcher, Jacob deGrom 8th, and the recently activated Eric Young Jr. 9th, while keeping Curtis Granderson in the top of the order. How exciting! How innovative! Experimental genius! Let's get going!

Surprisingly, it didn't work. The Mets lost anyway.

The 6-2 loss the Mets suffered was less an issue of the Innovative and Experimental lineup shakeup and the fact that the players in the lineup continue to exhibit a general inability to hit no matter where they're placed in the lineup, while Jacob deGrom was hit around a little bit by the Cardinals. The Cardinals, whom the Mets actually beat 3 or 4 in April if you can believe it, remain the most irritating team imaginable. Basically, they single and double you to death on offense, while running pitcher after pitcher out to the mound who throws 95mph gas. That's been their recipe for several years now, through the latter era of Experimental and Innovative Genius Tony LaRussa and into the new regime of Mike Matheny.

Unfortunately, Terry Collins is stuck in 1998 when it comes to the emulation of LaRussa. The pitcher batting 8th ploy came in a season when the Cardinals were lousy, and their only draw was the steroid-aided exploits of Mark McGwire, so LaRussa decided that he'd bat his pitcher 8th, and either Luis Ordaz or Placido Polanco or Joe McEwing 9th in an effort to possibly get an extra guy on base for McGwire. The result was pretty negligible. The Cardinals finished in 3rd place, generally a non-factor except for the McGwire human interest story. But at 83-79, the 1998 Cardinals appear to be light years better than the 2014 Mets, who right now seem hard-pressed to get to 70 wins. 

Other teams have attempted to be experimental and innovative like LaRussa, such as when Jack McKeon used to bat Dontrelle Willis 7th in the lineup, but in that instance, Willis was likely a better hitter than the guys he had hitting 8th and 9th. The problem is, each time a manager decided to be experimental and innovative like Tony LaRussa, he was doing so while managing a team that was completely a lost cause and the move was essentially grasping at straws. All it does is make the broadcasters and columnists marvel over how experimental and innovative Terry Collins or whoever is being in trying this lineup out instead of writing about how the team can't hit and generally is terrible. Or maybe they write about that anyway. I don't know, I stopped reading and I tuned the game out after about 5 innings. There wasn't anything experimental or innovative going on for, just the same old shit show. If you thought otherwise, you were lied to.

Here, Have This Game, We Don't Want It.

I think that, instead of sitting down and trying to make some sort of explanation for why his team played like a group of morons for close to 4 hours late last night, Jerry Manuel probably should have sat down for his postgame press conference and said only one thing:

"You're welcome, Joe."

Then, he should have got up and walked away. That's all that needs to be said after the Mets quite literally handed the game to the Dodgers.

I've made some brief references to the fact that the Mets have this rather annoying habit of playing like complete idiots every so often (this particularly seems to come in the last few weeks of the season), but last night, they took this problem to a startling new height.

It's fortunate, I suppose, that this was an extra-inning game on the West Coast. At least most Mets fans were spared the misery of actually watching (or listening) to this disaster unfold. I had the poor fortune of listening to the game on the radio, and you could see this ending coming a mile away. As soon as Ryan Church got called out for missing 3rd base, in a move that has to be considered vapor-lock of the highest and most inexcusable order, you knew that this game was done, the Mets were fucked, and it was only a matter of time before the Dodgers pushed across the winning run. At least they made it quick.

It's one thing to say that the Mets are banged up. And missing a pair of key players and their top sub from their starting lineup doesn't help. But, simply abandoning the fundamentals of baseball just makes matters worse. I'm not sure who, exactly made the 5 errors that occurred in last night's game. I know that Beltran got one because Pagan stupidly didn't pull up on a fly ball, and another one went to Jeremy Reed for his inability to simply throw a strike home to Castro. But nothing is an excuse for Ryan Church, who I figured to be a key player for the Mets this season. The Mets, as an organization, seem to have an unwritten MO with their players: If they like you, they'll hype you to death. But if they don't like you, they will bury you, and take every opportunity to do so. I don't know how or why, but Church is headed down that path. He didn't help himself by slumping after a quick start, but rather than let him work out his problems, Church got pushed into a 5-man shuffle. But nothing is an excuse for missing 3rd base in the 11th inning, when your run means taking the lead. I'd guess he's getting taken to task for it today, and, let's face it, he deserves it.

This game was so disgusting to listen to, I couldn't even fall asleep afterwards. Howie Rose said it best after the game, while doing a commercial for Wendy's. "If you still have an appetite after this game." That about sums it all up. What the hell kind of team is this, that can look brilliant for a week and beat the tar out of the Giants, then go out there and play like a bad reincarnation of the '62 Mets? Where do they go from here?