Everybody Wins!

The Mets had been kind of dancing and jabbing their way through the first week of the season, riding pitching, more pitching and Jay Bruce. But, finally, in the 8th game of the season, everyone woke up at once. The Mets bats banged out 20 hits and hit 7 Home Runs, 3 by Yoenis Cespedes, 2 from Lucas Duda, and 1 each from Travis d'Arnaud and Asdrubal Cabrera.

To nobody's surprise this took place in Philadelphia.

It's now been 3 times in club history that the Mets have hit 7 or more Home Runs in a game, and all three times it's happened at Citizens Bank Park. And you wonder why I kept referring to it as Steroid Field I all those years.

The Mets already had a 3-0 lead before Matt Harvey ever hit the mound, thanks to Yoenis Cespedes. While I was getting home from work and nodding off for a brief nap, he was busy golfing a Clay Buchholz offering out into the garden in Center Field. By time I woke up, he'd hit another, immediately following Asdrubal Cabrera's first of the season in the 4th inning. By this point, the Mets were ahead 8-1 and Reinvented Harvey was humming along.

In the 5th, Cespedes hit his 3rd Home Run and of course once that happened, all the focus turned to how many at bats he'd get over the remainder of the game, and how once he gets locked in, those Home Runs can come in bunches. To say nothing of the fact that by time Lucas Duda homered in the 6th and d'Arnaud hit one in the 8th, the Mets had three players that were a triple shy of a cycle...and of course it happened to be three of the least likely players to hit a triple. On the other hand, John Olerud hit for the cycle twice and he was one of the most glacial players in Mets history, so anything was possible.

None of these Baseball Oddities came to pass, and even Harvey's injury departure in the 6th turned into much ado about nothing...so how do you spin a game like this juxtaposed against every other time they've gone into Philadelphia and bludgeoned the Phillies into submission?

You don't, I suppose. You just take the 14-4 victory, put it in your back pocket and be happy about it, because the bottom line is that when everybody hits, everybody wins.

Glad You're Here

Philadelphia is a place where the Mets have, at least in the past couple of seasons, gone to wake up. Back in the days when the Phillies were the top banana in the league, it wasn't quite so pleasant, but as they're no longer the team to beat and those guys that made them such aren't around anymore, this neutered version of the Phillies are, well, kind of a punching bag. And the Mets treated them as such last year.

Still, I have this residual anxiety about playing the Phillies, probably because their young pitching staff can be sneaky good, as long as they remain healthy, and because the Mets have really stuck it to them so much over the past couple of years that they're probably pissed off and it's boiled over in a few sporadic instances.

Monday night was one such instance where their young pitching kept the Mets off balance and then they got a little chippy. But it didn't work. After Jerad Eickhoff mostly silenced the Mets for 7 innings, Edubray Ramos came into a tie game and immediately threw a pitch over Asdrubal Cabrera's head. You may recall what happened the last time these two crossed paths so I'd guess it wasn't lost on either party. But so that happened, benches got warned and the game went on. Ramos then proceeded to eat his lunch because he walked Cabrera and subsequently gave up a 2-run Home Run to Jay Bruce that ultimately served as the winning runs in this 4-3 Mets victory. For Bruce, who emphatically slammed home a high-five at home plate, this has to be a gratifying start. On Opening Day, I talked with George about how Bruce on this team didn't seem to make sense. George kept confusing him with Lucas Duda. It's not because I don't like Bruce or because he's destined to be a Ballclub Flog. It just felt as though he was here just because he had to. The Mets essentially found themselves stuck with him. And it wasn't lost on him either, and I can't imagine he was too thrilled about the situation either. But to his credit he's making the best of it and as most of the Mets batters have been kind of quiet over the first 7 games this season, Bruce has opened like a house afire and essentially won this game by himself (with an assist from the generally silently solid Jacob deGrom, who quashed an early rally, buckled down with less than his best stuff and ground out 6 solid innings).

This little gem of a game was of course mostly lost on me as I was out at a Passover Seder all night, as can happen early in the season. So I can't provide much in the way of observations beyond what I've seen on highlights. But I know pretty much everything I need to.

Sunday Hammers

I missed Saturday's game. That's nothing out of the ordinary since I missed most Saturday games last season, but at least unlike last season, I wasn't stuck on Long Island doing something I'd rather not have been doing. I was just out and didn't see the game, and based on how things turned out it's just as well. The Marlins once again did Stupid Marlin Things and the Mets couldn't recover.

So, in this early going, the Mets went into Sunday playing about as crucial a game as one could have for its 6th game of the season, trying to not get swept by the worms that are the Mickey Mouse Marlins and having to do so on The Biggest Game In The Galaxy, Sunday Night on ESPN. However, the Mets went out on The Biggest Game In The Galaxy with The Biggest Pitcher In The Galaxy and as such were able to ride 7 innings from Noah Syndergaard en route to a 5-2 victory to avert the sweep.

ESPN, as I've made note of in the past, has a tendency to latch on to one particular storyline during these games and run it into the ground. Usually, when the Mets are involved, this is at the Mets' expense. But when the opponent is the Marlins, who as a franchise are a punchline, there's not much they could do, and for as much as they tried to shove Giancarlo Stanton in our faces, he was little match for Syndergaard. In fact, most of the Marlins were little match, except for a 3rd inning hiccup that involved Billy Marlins, who further proved my theory that he's the most Marlin Marlin ever, and an untimely Yoenis Cespedes error. But after Dee Gordon doubled home two runs to make the score 3-2, Syndergaard knuckled down and, abetted by Rene Rivera, put the Marlins in their proper place. Gordon attempted to steal 3rd, and was thrown out. J.P. Regalbuto followed with an infield single and when he tried to get cute and steal 2nd, he got thrown out as well. From there, Syndergaard laid down the mjölnir and put the Marlins to sleep. There was something resembling a threat in the 5th inning, but little beyond that.

On the other side, the Mets ran out to a 3-0 lead in the 1st against Edinson Volquez, kicked off by an Asdrubal Cabrera bunt single. Later, Jay Bruce and Michael Conforto both hit Home Runs off of Volquez, the former in support of a continued hot start and the latter the kind of bomb we know he's capable of if he'd only just be allowed to start consistently. But that, then, is another discussion for another day.

For the Mets, it's now on to the first Road trip of the season and the hope that a little consistency will follow now that they're in the swing of playing on a regular basis.

Processes

It's easy to be disappointed in the way Zack Wheeler's return to the Major Leagues kind of fizzled out in a stream of bloops and blasts. But, then again, after having to go through the Big Boy Surgery, and then having to go through multiple setbacks while trying to come back from the damn thing, and ending up missing two entire seasons, I don't think it quite fair to view one game in a vacuum. Sure. You want him to come back, throw 5 shutout innings, tip his cap and everything will be great but it doesn't always work that way. Wheeler hasn't always worked that way. This comeback is a process, and this has to be viewed as just a step in that process. Simply making it back to the Major Leagues and pitching in a game is the accomplishment. The 4 innings, 6 hits, 5 runs and 4 strikeouts are just a starting point.

Back before Wheeler got hurt, which seems like a lifetime ago considering it was the tail end of The Dark Ages Of The Mets, you saw a lot of the inconsistencies that Wheeler displayed this evening. His fastball was great, but he struggled at times with the location and consistency of his secondary pitches, he'd get too fine, and then batters would wait and sit on his fastball. And, well, this is pretty much the story of his comeback game. He was clearly amped up in the 1st inning and shot through the Marlins with ease, throwing mostly fastballs. But in the 2nd, he started working in breaking pitches and things weren't working quite as well, and he gave up a walk, and a bloop hit, and then Billy Marlins cranked a 2-run triple and things fell apart from there. In the 3rd, it was more of the same. A dunk hit preceded a long Home Run by Hamburgers Yelich, and Wheeler's night was officially a nightmare. Don't even get me started on it happening against the Marlins, who seem just as irritating as ever, especially if Keith Hernandez keeps fawning over their wonderful Outfielders. Ultimately, the game dissolved into one of those miserable April Night Games where it's freezing, the Mets are getting killed, and everybody just leaves after the 6th inning.

I know this because I've been to games like that. And don't think I wasn't tempted to go out there tonight to see Wheeler's return. But, perhaps wisdom and old age has begun to win out, as I knew early in the day that it was going to be cold and lousy out, and the last thing I wanted to do was to sit out at Citi Field and freeze my ass off, when it's Friday and I'm tired and cranky. In fact, that's what happened. I watched three innings of this game, got fed up, started having one of my Marlin-induced bouts of blind rage, then started to fall asleep, and ultimately shut the game off and took a nap. In the past, I feel like I would have rooked myself into going to more games in this Opening Week homestand, but perhaps I've finally wised up.

He's Still Here

I have at times felt like I'm the last Mets fan in Matt Harvey's corner. I know that we all want him to do well, and I also know that he's brought some of his issues on himself for one reason or another, but I've seen no reason why Harvey couldn't persevere, shake off his issues and regain some of the luster that he'd lost over the past year. He's already proven that he can come back from a major injury and be successful. In reality, and I've said this before, people seem to just have a problem with Matt Harvey being Matt Harvey. This Spring, while every time he took the mound seemed to be scrutinized, most people were up in arms over the fact that he was seen cavorting around Miami with a model, drinking and smoking and generally having a nice little date for himself. And because he's Matt Harvey, this gives everyone free license to point and yell about what a jerk he is, and how the Mets need to trade him because he's a distraction and a cancer.

Does not compute. We've all been on dates with models and drank and smoked, and nobody's following us around with cameras and posting photos on the internet, and people at our jobs aren't yelling about how we need to be traded. So I say baloney. I think people's dislike of Harvey is based mostly on jealousy. He projects an aura of arrogance but in reality is probably just as insecure as anyone else. The difference is he pitches for the Mets and most people do not.

So that all lines up for this evening's game at Citi Field, which was Harvey's first start since he got run off the mound last July and then went under the knife for the second time in 3 years. It was hard to know what to expect, since his Florida outings were kind of a mixed bag and he wasn't throwing with quite the same pop as he used to. And he was facing the Braves, who'd cuffed him around more than once last year. But out of the darkness, Harvey re-emerged as a pitcher, and rather than trying to blow everyone away instead used what he had, working with a fastball in the mid-90s instead of the high 90s, and dropping curves and sliders and changeups and generally inducing weak contact. He shot through the 1st inning on 6 pitches, entered the 7th having thrown only 67, and by time he departed after 6.2 innings, he'd allowed 3 hits, no walks and 4 strikeouts, while only being touched up for a pair of solo Home Runs from Matt Kemp. More importantly, by time the 7th inning started, and Harvey kicked things off by striking out Dansby Swanson and Freddie Freeman, you actually started to hear those "HAR-VEY! HAR-VEY!" chants once again.

Offensively, the Mets again started slow, facing Jaime Garcia, the ex-Cardinal who seems oddly out of place on this Braves team. It took until the 5th for the Mets to finally break through, when Neil Walker singled, and Jay Bruce walked, and then Travis d'Arnaud doubled both of them home, a good sign since d'Arnaud hit something like .035 with runners in scoring position last year. In the 6th, the Mets extended their lead when Wilmer Flores did what he usually does against left handed pitchers and hit a 2-run Home Run, and in the 7th, the Mets put the game away with two more runs. Fernando Salas and Addison Reed then salted away the final innings of this 6-2 victory.

The story, however, will be Harvey, who embarked on a bit of a redemption of sorts and proved that although he might not be the pitcher he was two years ago, and may never again be the pitcher he was four years ago, he's still a good pitcher and he still is capable of being someone we can count on to deliver a good performance.