Not Sorry

Wednesday afternoon was one of those "working man's specials," and as such I didn't see any of the game, so I have to subject you to one of my "less informed" summaries.

It was good until it sucked.

That seems about the best way to sum this game up. The Mets had a perfectly good opportunity to steal a win with their Plan H starter Tommy Milone, sweep the Giants and hop over the .500 mark. They slogged their way through against Matt Cain, got a Home Run from Jay Bruce, an RBI single from Milone himself, and a 3-2 lead was handed to Jeurys Familia in the 9th.

Now, of course, I only know what transpired from there on Gamecast, so I don't know just how egregious Wilmer Flores' tide-turning error actually was. But it fucked everything up good and proper. Still, Familia ought to have been game enough to get out of this. We've seen him do it before. Then again, we've seen him come completely unglued against this opponent as well. Instead of getting another ground ball, he gave up a hit to Hunter Pence to tie the game, because, well, Hunter Pence was genetically engineered to get a hit in that spot, and then he gave up a 3 run double to Christian Arroyo to torch the whole thing. Flores then, of course, came within mere feet of atoning for his sins in the bottom of the inning but it was a day late and a bounce short and instead of a sweep, the Mets fell 6-5 and now go on the road once again a game under .500.

These do happen sometimes, irritating as it may be. If the Mets weren't so undermanned right now maybe they wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place but such are the vicissitudes of Baseball. It's still irksome. I'm not sorry I missed it.

More Relevant Action

I was back at Citi Field last night to see the Mets move on from the gobble gobble turkey that is the Matt Harvey saga and cruise—cruise—to an easy 6-1 victory over the Giants on the strength of a wonderful outing by onetime Harvey undercard Zack Wheeler.

It seems rather odd that here, on May 9th, I was attending only my 4th game of this season. April seems to have been a bit of a blur and in my whisened age I've decided against going to games in April simply for the sake of going to games and ultimately freezing my ass off in hopeless situations. It wasn't exactly warm out at Citi Field for May 9th regardless. But at least the Mets won the game and got me back on in the win column. It was also the second time this season I'd been to a Zack Wheeler start, which of course means I have now seen him as many times this season as Julio Teheran.

But at any rate, I was slightly on the late side in arriving, which can happen on these Tuesday nights, and so I was on line getting food while Wheeler was carving up the top of the Giants batting order in the 1st. The Giants still have these names in their lineup that can cause some irritation (that means you, Hunter Pence), but for the most part they've played rather poorly and haven't been helped by a rash of injuries of their own. So it's not just us if that makes you feel better. Wheeler struck out the aforementioned Pence, as well as Horshoe Dunkley in the 1st, but that seemed to be a mirage; those two early Ks represented half of his ultimate total for the night. The remainder of his evening wasn't necessarily a thing of beauty, but it accomplished what it needed to. Though he still threw too many pitches too early in the game, Wheeler managed to make it through 6 very solid innings, allowing the Giants a Buster Posey Home Run, a single by opposing Pitcher Jeff Samardzija, and not much else as he picked up a well-earned win in what was probably as good a game as he's pitched this season to date.

Wheeler was helped, of course, by the fact that the Mets attacked Samardzija early and often, to the point where they'd ran out to a 4-0 lead before I'd even finished eating. Neil Walker drove in the first two runs with what was charitably scored a triple after Eduardo Nunez (duh yankee prospect) butchered a sinking line drive, and later Jose Reyes and Rene Rivera drove home runs of their own. In the second, the Mets continued their onslaught when Michael Conforto and T.J. Rivera hit back-to-back doubles to extend the lead. Rivera, who's been hitting basically everything in sight of late, had 3 hits by the 4th inning. Conforto capped off his night with a long Home Run in the 7th, and the game basically sailed home from there, on a night when for whatever reason Terry Collins managed a 5-run lead as though it were a 1-run lead and burned through Jerry Blevins, Addison Reed and Jeurys Familia in the 8th and 9th innings.

The win, of course, brings the Mets back to .500, which doesn't seem like much but, again, when half the team is injured, including the two players considered to be most critical to the team's success, and when they've been written off as tired and old and skidding back to irrelevance, it's sort of a leaping off point. You can write the Mets off all you want, and continue to kick them, but as some point you need to own up to the fact that you're kicking a team that's won 8 of their last 11 playing 2nd and 3rd string guys after most of the same group roared back from the dead to run into the Wildcard game last year. So, again, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the team just yet. Even if they appear to be a total shit show off the field.

The Mets Are Falling! The Mets Are Falling!

I didn't actually see any of Monday night's game against the Giants. A work engagement had me preoccupied as things do from time to time. But, you know, after an entire day of being subjected to some of the most venomous, gloom and doom stories about Matt Harvey and the demise of the supposedly-but-never-actually-mighty Mets, I suppose most Mets fans couldn't be blamed at all if they'd decided to start showing up to Citi Field with paper bags on their heads or simply lock themselves in a closet with the lights off for the next five years. That's basically what everyone would have you believe. On a team with no leadership, no direction and an atmosphere where the inmates are running the asylum. 25 guys, 25 cabs. And yet another instance of Mets fans being sold a bill of goods and being left holding their cocks while talent and opportunity passes them by and the other team steals their thunder.

So, I mean, why even pay attention, right? If they're just going to annoy me and break my heart again...Oh. Wait. You mean they came from behind twice on Monday night, Jacob deGrom struck out 11 batters and the Mets won the game on a Neil Walker hit in the bottom of the 9th?

Someone, somewhere dropped a "That's why they play the games" last week on the Mets to prove that they were overrated. I think another "That's why they play the games" could be used now to prove that you can't count the Mets out, no matter how terrible things may seem.

Double Disaster

You know when you wake up, look at your phone and see an ESPN alert that reads "New York Mets P Matt Harvey suspended three games without pay for violating team rules" that it's going to be a great day.

In what shook out as yet another ugly chapter in the checkered career of Matt Harvey, the embattled pitcher was suspended on the day he was supposed to take the mound against the Marlins. Of course, in the Mets' typically macabre fashion, it was reported as reasons that were "going to be kept internal," and when you leave things like this up to the imaginations of the press and the public, well, everything kind of went haywire from there. Reports of reasons for this were typically ridiculous and thoughts of the obvious cause—what was that dildo doing in Kevin Plawecki's locker anyway???—were eventually quashed when it was reported that Harvey no-showed Saturday's game.

Sigh. I try to give Harvey the benefit of the doubt but then he does things like this and I wonder why I waste my energy.

At any rate, not only did he screw himself, he screwed his team, since instead of throwing him at the Marlins on Sunday, we were subjected to poor Adam Wilk, who ostensibly was the closest thing to a warm body the Mets had available to pitch a game. And, you know, when the best guy you can throw out on the mound is a guy who maybe 10% of your fan base has heard of...Needless to say, it didn't go well.

Wilk's afternoon could rather simply be summed up as he was screwed the moment Giancarlo Stanton stepped in the batter's box. In the first inning, he hit a Home Run off the facing of the 2nd deck in Left Field. In the 3rd, he hit one even farther. By the 4th, the game was completely out of hand and Wilk was done for the day, and one can assume into the Met annals next to such names as Chan Ho Park and Brett Hinchcliffe. Therest of the team, which was probably suffering from shellshock stemming either from the Harvey news, or Wilk's performance, or both, barely made a peep against Jose Urena and the end result was that they mustered one hit in a thoroughly embarrassing 7-0 loss.

And, you know, it's "now what?" time again. The Mets now sit at 14-16, which considering the state of the team health-wise isn't awful, but if you believe what you read about the Mets, the bloom is off the rose and the team is spiraling out of control towards a 90-loss season and a return to obscurity. I don't know. Right now, all I know is that that's their record and now they're finally going to play some games against teams outside their division and eventually, the truth will come out. About everything.

Small Big Ball

The Mets continued their recent trend of great offense/lousy pitching again on Saturday, as they jumped on Odrisamer Despaigne early and often to the tune of a 5-run 1st inning, then survived another shaky outing from Robert Gsellman and another injury, this time to Asdrubal Cabrera, and eventually turned things back on late against the Marlins bullpen to come away with another win, this one by an 11-3 score, which gives the Mets 6 wins in their last 8 games and 3 series wins in a row.

As usual, it is the little things that add up.

Not that it matters much to the press, who seems more interested in cracking on the Mets than actually reporting on what happens in the games, but the Marlins were the victims of some stupid in this game. Their scheduled starter, Wei Yin Chen, went on the DL on Friday with the mythical "tired arm," for those who think that sort of thing only happens to the Mets one month into the season. The replacement, Despaigne, who famously no-hit the Mets into the 8th inning that one time, was a minor irritant, as the Mets hammered him early and often and led 5-0 after 1 inning. The Marlins played like you'd expect them to, as they kicked the ball around plenty, starting off with Nickleback mishandling a hot shot from Michael Conforto that started the rally. Later, balls continued to clank off gloves and fly balls were bungled as the Mets tacked on more runs late in the game. Once again, they did so without the virtue of a Home Run; most of these runs scored because the Mets were working counts and hitting singles and doubles and just moving the line along. Conforto alone had 2 RBIs without the virtue of a hit as he walked three times, twice with the bases loaded, the latter time coming after a brilliant AB where he fell behind 0-2 and managed to check his swing three times to work out the walk. But the point is, if you just hit singles and doubles and bunch them all together, you'll accomplish the job just as well as if you sat back and waited for Cespedes to hit the 3-run HR.

Gsellman was effective, if not especially good, in his 5 innings. It seems to be more an issue of location and execution rather than stuff, that's preventing him from pitching as solidly as he did down the stretch last year. I can't quite figure it out just yet. With a full complement of pitchers, he might be on thinner ice but as the numbers have dwindled, there's not many other passable options. Certainly not if Montero continues to make an ass of himself whenever he gets an opportunity.

So it becomes the offense that has to shoulder the load, and they've done so as they scored 5 or more runs for the 9th game in a row, which is a far cry from the days when they were hard pressed to score 5 runs in a week. Then again, this could just as easily flip so we should just enjoy it while it lasts.