The Wrong Decision

I had tickets to Friday night's game at Citi Field. It was on my plan. I'd made plans to go with my other half, which would be her first game of the season. But several mitigating circumstances intervened. The first was the horrendous and torrential rain that fell in New York basically all day on Friday. Generally, even when it rains like this, the Mets will keep the game scheduled until the last minute for a variety of reasons, among them the potential for the mythical "window," and the desire to get the gates open and get some people in the stadium to buy food and whatnot—a favorite trick of Ratso Wilpon's.

The other circumstance was, well, I'm getting older and after what had turned into a particularly strenuous week at work, I was tired. I was tired and I wouldn't have minded at all if they cancelled the game and allowed me to go home and take a nap. But that rainout alert never came, in spite of multiple alerts from the Emergency Alert system and reports of flash floods all over the city. 5:00 passed, and in fact 6:00 approached and my other half begged out, meaning that if I were going to go, I was on my own. Had we thought about it ahead of time, I might have swapped the tickets out altogether. 6:00 passed and I was delayed at work outright, so if I were going to go, I'd be late. But I left and got on my way, feeling very indecisive.

I got as far as the 7 train platform at Grand Central, a point at which I could take one train and go to the game, or get on the other train and go home. I weighed the options. The potential for rain still existed. But I did want to go to a game. But Rafael Montero was starting for the Mets, which generally has been a losing proposition. But what if this was the night he got it together? But I'm tired. But it's Friday. Eventually, I decided to just go home and swap the tickets out for another date. It was already the 2nd inning by time I got home, which probably would have been about the same time I would have arrived at Citi Field.

Immediately, I got in bed and took a nap. By time I woke up, it was somewhere in the 6th inning and I wasn't particularly surprised to hear that Montero was awful and the Mets were losing 7-3. I felt better because I wasn't there to see it, to say nothing of having to suffer the indignity of sitting through a beating at the hands of the Mickey Mouse Marlins.

But then the Mets came back in the 7th, another rally where they just kept hitting singles and doubles, and working counts, and forcing walks. Wilmer Flores was heavily involved, as was Asdrubal Cabrera and Michael Conforto. It was 7-5 when T.J. Rivera, who'd earlier homered, hit a 2-run double to tie the game off of Brad Ziegler, who seemed to not know what had hit him. A pitching change, 2 outs and an intentional walk later, it appeared the game would remain tied, but Kyle Barraclough, after intentionally walking Granderson, couldn't find the plate against Flores and unintentionally walked him to force in the lead run and put the Mets ahead 8-7. A couple of quiet innings from Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia later, the Mets had pulled off a real nut-kicker of a win against the Marlins, coming back from a 6-run deficit to win, 8-7.

Well, shit. I guess I should have gone after all. Even though it clearly had begun raining again by the end of the game and some time later in the evening, probably about when I would have arrived home, it really started pouring. I did feel badly about not going since they won. That, I suppose, isn't surprising. Had the game held and the Mets gone down in flames, I probably would have been thrilled that I wasn't there to subject myself to it. It's rare that this happens (I am reminded of a Daisuke Matsuzaka game a few years ago I skipped and ended up missing a 3 hour, 50 minute game that the Mets lost terribly) but sometimes you make the wrong choice. That's a bad job by me.

Tiny Ballparks

The Mets scored 16 runs last night in order to bail out Jacob deGrom, who struggled to make his way through 5 innings against the Atlanta Braves. If that isn't indication that this season has gone completely haywire, well, I'm not sure what you need to see.

This new stadium in Atlanta, SunTrust ChopHouse or whatever they choose to call it, doesn't look terribly dis-similar to Citi Field if you were just watching a game on TV. It's got that "Brickyard" wall behind home plate, typical of these new parks, with some whimsical touches out beyond the outfield wall, some quirks like a low Outfield fence and what have you. But the similarities seem to end there. Where Citi Field looks large and plays large, SunTrust is clearly the exact opposite. In April, fly balls in Citi Field that look good off the bat end up getting swallowed in by the Outfield, and even moving the fences in twice hasn't changed things. In SunTrust, baseballs seem to fly out with regularity, and even line drives seem to fly. What's going to happen in the Summer? This will be the latest Steroid Field, right up there with Citizens Bank Park, Great American Ballpark and that other stadium I can't remember with the 200' Right Field line.

But so the Mets did manage to score 16 runs Wednesday, striking early and often against our old friend Bartolo Colon, who had a hard time getting through 4 innings. We know that Bartolo is susceptible to these "Fat and sweaty" games every so often and the Mets happen to be the beneficiary of one of these games. They weren't hitting the ball out of the ballpark but, of course, there are many ways to score runs and the Mets seem to have remembered this, banging out 20 hits in order to plate all those runs. And everyone seemed to chip in, Jose Reyes continued to slowly emerge from his April cave and drove in 5 runs, Rene Rivera drove in 3, Michael Conforto was in the middle of things and even Jacob deGrom had 2 hits. Which was fortunate because he wasn't especially sharp on the mound.

deGrom has now had 2 outings in his last 3 where he's kind of fizzled out and given up too many walks, or lost his point or whatever, which is kind of worrisome looking at the big picture and the fact that this Mets rotation isn't at all resembling what they were supposed to be right now. And, yes, that means that people are writing snarky articles and making snide comments because they have nothing better to do than crack on the Mets. But, as seasons go, players and staffs run hot and cold and I'd expect deGrom will even himself out. Just like I wouldn't expect the Mets offense to run up 16 runs on a regular basis. Really, it's the resiliency more than anything else that soothes the worry. The Mets have shown previously that they can be down but not out. A couple of wins in Washington, a couple of wins in Atlanta with a chance for more, and go from there.

I Don't Like This Place That Much...

OK, OK. On the second night Atlanta turned back into Atlanta and nothing went right for the Mets.

After being spotted a 2-0 lead thanks to a Jay Bruce Home Run, Matt Harvey handed the lead back to the Braves almost immediately, and then just kind of slogged through the remainder of his outing as the Braves ostensibly waterboarded him to death with a series of singles and doubles, inching ahead and eventually out of reach and only a Pig-Lipstick Grand Slam from Bruce in the 9th made the final score a more respectable-looking 9-7 as opposed to the 9-3 mess this game really should be remembered as.

This was one of those games that I kind of kept tuning in and out of. I was late tuning in altogether, in spite of the fact that most Atlanta games start at 7:35 instead of the more customary 7:10, so if nothing else it was only the 2nd inning when I put the game on, but irregardless it was pushing 8:30, which wasn't a good sign. At that point it was already 2-2 and Atlanta went ahead 3-2 when Ender Inciarte injected himself into the proceedings and made a pain in the ass of himself, which is generally what he does against the Mets. Asdrubal Cabrera re-tied the game in the 3rd with a Home Run that was really tagged, but then in the 4th Harvey kind of melted down and the Braves just kept getting hits and scoring runs and by time the dust cleared it was well after 9pm, the Mets were behind 6-3 and everything was terrible. I couldn't even enjoy getting to see our dear old friend R.A. Dickey float that Knuckleball around like he used to.

Then, I turned the game off altogether, or, more appropriately, I was eating dinner with my other half and she asked that we watch something else. So I missed Josh Smoker/Fernando Salas turn the game into a tire fire in the 7th, but I guess that's just as well. But I was back in time to see Bruce hit a truly irrelevant Grand Slam in the 9th to serve no other purpose than pad his stats, force a pitching change and prolong the game for another 5 minutes.

I mean, yes, I know. The Mets weren't going to go Forever-and-0 at SunTrust Yards and that first loss was probably going to come at some point this week because the Mets just aren't doing that well. And I'm sure there will be days that this place will just rankle me to no end. But it's too early to tell whether it's as rancid as its predecessor, or some other similarly troublesome ballparks where nothing good ever happens to the Mets (see: Petco Park). Time will, I suppose, tell.

I Like This Place!

The Mets played their first game in Suburban Atlanta's sparkling new SunTrust Park or SunTrust Field last night, a refreshing change after playing the past 20 years in a stadium that shall no longer be named, where they posted a record of 20-142 and suffered innumerable indignities. And after one batter in this new place, perhaps we saw signs that things would be different here. Michael Conforto led off the game with a Home Run, getting things off on the right foot, and spurred the Mets on to a 7-5 victory.

I like this new place already!

SunTrust Park or Field or Gulag or whatever they're calling it seems to be a fairly generic-looking "old new" ballpark, which is now what basically every stadium is nowadays. The other place wasn't especially memorable either, except for all the wrong reasons but that didn't even have a "retro" feel to it. I suspect, as time passes and these new stadiums eventually lose their shine, that the new retro will become the utilitarian, cookie-cutter stadiums of the 1960s, so maybe someday we'll get Shea Stadium and Fulton County Stadium back, but what the hell do I know.

The Mets scored early and often against Julio Teheran, which they could have done last week if they'd bothered to hit, since he was ripe for the taking, and on the other side, Robert Gsellman if nothing else didn't have the complete and total meltdown that he did last week and managed to get through 5 plus innings allowing 5 runs instead of giving them all up in the 1st inning, which was nice of him. In fact, it was actually good enough to net him a victory this time around.

Other good things happened too. Conforto supplemented his Home Run with a 2-run single in the 3rd inning. Jose Reyes, who has appeared to show some signs of consciousness lately, hit a Home Run late to give the Mets an insurance run. Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia finished out the game with some more cobweb-shaking performances or stabilizing performances as the case may be. Really, more than anything else, the Mets needed this victory just to heal everyone's psyche after the early-morning injury news regarding Noah Syndergaard. To say nothing of the fact that they needed to remind everyone that they were still a viable team after getting 23 runs hung on them on Sunday. What this will lead to, I'm not sure. It feels like a long road back to respectability at this point, but at least they didn't have to follow up Sunday's debacle with having to go to Atlanta Baseball Hell.

Total System Failure

It's just as well that the Mets dropped into full-on asshole mode yesterday as the Nationals blew their doors off by the score of 23-5. They'd already made asses of themselves by the 2nd inning when Noah Syndergaard left the game grimacing and grasping his armpit. You know, after he brazenly pronounced himself as "fine" and refused an MRI to see what exactly was bothering him after he was scratched twice last week.

I could go further into just how mind-numbing the stupidity is that permeates through this organization sometimes but really, why waste my time? The #LOLMets-ers and the "BACKMAN, BABY!" jackasses, the closeted Yankee castrati folks do a good enough job for me. I've gone over plenty of times just how tiresome these people have become, and how the Mets have been enough of a laughingstock over the years that maybe it's just time to leave it alone, but then something like this happens and I remember that in so many of these instances the Mets seem to invite this treatment on themselves. Their best pitcher wants to pitch, who can blame him? But he needs to remember that he's neither a doctor, nor is he invincible and maybe he ought to listen to the team trainers if they think he should have an MRI. Even if it means listening to Cortisone Shot Ramirez. Because rather than just nipping this in the bud, Syndergaard decided to be a hero, went out and immediately got lit up for 5 runs in the 1st inning after basically allowing 5 runs all season to that point, or something like that. So that right there ought to have told you something was up. Syndergaard just doesn't get torched like that out of the gate. I didn't even watch and I probably could have told you that he was screwing around with his mechanics to overcompensate for his ailing giblets. And then in the 2nd inning it all came crashing down as he threw one pitch too many and started grimacing and grabbing his armpit, and of course that sent every Mets fan off the ledge. Fortunately (SILVER LINING ALERT) this wasn't the absolute worst case scenario since the Big Boy Surgery is everyone's ultimate fear for him, but when you go out there and mess up your mechanics to mask an injury, this is what happens. You get hurt and now the Mets have to deal with the consequences since he's probably going to be out for a couple of months. To say nothing of the fact that he's getting destroyed in the court of public opinion in a manner to rival Matt Harvey.

After that the wheels basically came off, and again I think the Mets needed to have this happen because sometimes you just need to get completely and totally humiliated in order to wake up and acknowledge your problems. The Nationals have broken from the gate like a house afire and this just another feather in their cap, but teams with championship aspirations aren't supposed to get their asses handed to them like this and in reality, that it happened is just scenery. What's most crucial is how they respond to this. If getting lit on fire and losing your best pitcher and your best hitter in the span of 4 days sends the team into a tailspin, well, then they deserve to be laughed at. We all to. This is supposed to be a Championship-caliber team and if they crumble after 4 weeks of the season then I guess we all fell for the bill of goods again and this is just another season where we end up with our dicks in our hands. I'm kind of sick of it. Learn from this and work forward. It's happened before with this group, believe it or not.