Mets Win, Mets Win, Holy Crap!
In what can only be described as an offensive eruption, the New York Mets scored six runs in a single game. The six runs are the most they have scored in a game since July 5 and the first time since the All-Star break that they have scored more than 4 runs in a game.
Why the offense has been struggling is a mystery, but one thing can’t be ignored.
The Mets can only win a game if the starting pitcher is Johan Santana.
[picappgallerysingle id="9416359"]
In the last 15 games the Mets are 4-11, all four of the wins came in games started by Santana. He is 3-0 in those games, and should be 4-0 except for Francisco Rodriguez and his blown save/win against the Giants.
Even the six runs the Mets scored didn’t come via the bats getting hot. They came as the Mets took advantage of miscues and poor pitching from the Dodgers.
The first run came on a David Wright strikeout. With runners on first and third with one out, Luis Castillo took off for second on a third strike to Wright. The throw was in time, but the ball popped out of second baseman Blake DeWitt’s glove and Jose Reyes sprinted home from third.
[picappgallerysingle id="9412816"]
The last four runs, all in the 8th inning, scored while the Mets managed just a single hit. The Mets received four walks -from three different Dodger pitchers- but still had scored only one run on a Wright sac fly. The big (and only) hit came from Jason Bay, who doubled to deep right center to empty the bases and pushed the lead to 6-1.
The only other run the Mets scored was on an Ike Davis solo homer in the second, it was his 14th of the year and third since the All-Star Break.
One win isn’t the cure-all of the season, but all winning streaks start after the first win. The Mets need a winning streak badly, its been more than a month since the Mets won consecutive games (June 22-23) and the Braves (and now Phillies) aren’t going to let us back into the race.
The Mets have two choices, roll over and die or man up start making up some ground.
There is another choice, but it involves starting Johan Santana every other day.
Mets Tear Out My Heart Again
So, I get up at 1:30AM to get ready for work, flip on the computer and see that the Mets game is still on. As I wait for the bottom of the 12th to start I read this article about how the Mets are giving up on the season due to the fact that they have decided to reactivate Oliver Perez. I whole heartedly agree with each and every fact in the article.
Bringing back Perez means that the Mets have thrown in the towel. They will continue to pay this albatross, that he will continue to hold them ransom. I understand that they owe him a ton of money through the end of the 2011 season and they pray that somehow he will find his old self. (Hint: he won’t)
They are afraid that, if released, some team, some where will scoop him up for a pittance and he will transform himself into Randy Johnson. (Hint: he won’t)
Mets history is full of pitchers, cast off and traded away, who’ve gone on to prosper elsewhere. The Mets are especially good of getting rid of pitchers who throw no-hitters, made more painful by the fact that the Mets have never had one in 50 years.
Not sure which one hurts more. Our franchises all time best pitcher, Tom Seaver, throwing one for Cincinnati; or our greatest might-have-been, Dwight Gooden, throwing his for the Yankees. The Yankees!!
When ESPN Gamecast finally loads I see that Perez is in the game and there is already a man on first with no outs. He goes 0-2 on Justin Upton, only to walk him with four straight balls.
After getting a man to ground out back to the pitcher he has to intentionally walk Mark Reynolds to load the bases. Falling behind 2-0 on Steven Drew, he gets him to pop out to third. Now there are two outs. I was surprised that Drew didn’t win the game there.
Gamecast slowly reveals the game to me, but I can feel that Adam LaRoche will be the last batter of the game. A single to right, a walk, a double down the line, I know its coming, something that will make my drive to Charlotte all the more painful.
And then it happens, LaRoche flies out to end the inning.
What? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Perez was supposed to lose the game, maybe he will, who knows. But I won’t find out until later as I shut the lid on my laptop.
Five hours later, I get back home and I still don’t know what happened.
For whatever reason, neither ESPN Radio nor the local sports talk station mentioned the Mets/Diamondbacks game during their daily recaps at 3 AM. I guess the score of the game between a last place team and a soon-to-be fourth place team doesn’t even warrant the final.
So before I find out, I am going to guess what happened. Here we go.
The Mets go listless in the top of the 13th, maybe getting a single base runner, but only after two were out. In the bottom of the inning, Perez gets the first man out, then walks the next batter. The one after that, some weak hitting 8th place hitter -or another of that ilk- drives a 3-1 pitch into the gap, giving his team the win and the Mets another walk-off loss.
Diamondbacks 4. Mets 3. In 13 innings.
Now to check to see how accurate I was.
Well, I had the result and the Diamondbacks hero right; but the inning and losing pitcher wrong.
What does that mean? That I know this team? This franchise? (Answer: yes)
No. What it means is the Mets lost. Again.
Three straight to the NL West cellar dwellers, who, even after winning three games at home, still have a losing home record (24-25). A team that hadn’t won consecutive games for their new manager. Ever.
The season is over.
The Mets need to play .600 ball for the rest of the season to get 90 wins. They have shown that they can do that for one month, but not two in a row.
In some kind of mockery of the Julian calendar, the Mets are 32-17 in months with 30 days and 17-29 in months with 31 days.
So, August will suck and then September, when its too late, the Mets will win 20 games in the month and still finish 4 games back in the Wild Card.
Mets Offense Lost In Desert
The New York Mets are already looking for a way back home, probably to see if they could find their bats.
The Mets lost 3-2 to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday and gave interim D-Backs manager Kirk Gibson his first winning streak since he took over on July 2.
The loss dropped the Mets to 1-5 on the West Coast swing. They are 2-8 over their last 10 games and have lost 4.5 games in the standings.
In just the second game since May of 2009 with Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and David Wright together in the line up, the Mets offense sputtered again. After wasting their best opportunity to score in the first, bases loaded and just one out, the Mets didn’t have another base runner until Reyes led off the sixth with a single. He was promptly erased on a double play.
The offense, which had been satisfactory in May and June, has returned to its April ways. As a team the numbers for July are down: batting average (.236), on-base percentage (.290) and slugging (.358). If it weren’t for the Marlins, the Mets would be dead last in all these stats for the month in the NL. The current road trip has only weakened those numbers, as they are barely over the Mendoza line as a team at .203 since the All-Star Break.
The return of Carlos Beltran hasn’t jump started the team like they had hoped, granted it hasn’t even been a full week since his return, but so far the exit numbers do not look good. They are scoring 2.93 runs per game in July, down almost two full runs from June (4.85).
The only sparks for the Mets on Tuesday came from Josh Thole and Angel Pagan, who both homered. For Thole it was is first career home run and for Pagan, it was his seventh of the season. Thole is hitting .500 for the season (12-for-24) and Pagan seems to be the only Mets hitter who hasn’t been inflicted by a poor streak in 2010.
A day after the bullpen was forced to work overtime, cleaning up for Mike Pelfrey by throwing 6.2 innings, R.A. Dickey gave the Mets just what they needed, seven strong innings.
After starting 6-0 Dickey has lost four straight decisions, not all of them have been his fault. He pitched well on Tuesday, allowing just three runs over seven innings. In his past five starts Dickey is 0-4 with an ERA of just 3.31, in the four losses the Mets have scored just seven runs for him, a trend that is not only plaguing him, but most of the Mets starters.
The pitching has been there -for the most part- all season long. They haven’t been able to get all the starters on the same page at the same time this year, but they have shown that they can win consistently if three or four of them are pitching well.
Its been the offense that has them 6.5 games back and fading. Poor hitting has been the reason the Mets are 5-11 in the month of July and it could be the reason that the Braves have a double digit lead in the NL East by the time the month ends. Maybe someone at Citi Field can find the bats for the Mets and ship them to Los Angeles for the end of the road trip.
Mets Avoid Sweep With Gift
Is that all it took? Taking Carlos Beltran out of the line up. The Mets welcomed their All-Star centerfielder back in standard Mets fashion by losing his first three games back, then won the game he sat out.
The New York Mets started their West Coast trip with three straight losses against the San Francisco Giants before finally winning the finale. Barely.
After being shutout by Tim Lincecum and Barry Zito in the opening two games, they were blown out in the third game. The Mets escaped with a win in the last game, but not before almost giving that one away.
Johan Santana pitched well again and came away with another no decision, and he climbed to the top of an auspicious list. He is now tied for first in the wordy category ‘most starts without winning when allowing one or fewer runs’ this season with six.
[picappgallerysingle id="9376777"]
Since July 1, Santana has thrown 31 innings, allowed just 2 runs (0.56 ERA) and has appeared to turn a corner on this season.
“I had to step up,” said Santana. “It’s getting to a point where I have all pitches working.”
The Mets nearly threw away the final game in what’s become the fashion this season, a walk-off loss. Had it happened it would have been number 11 for the season, and it nearly did.
Jason Bay was already leaving the field in the bottom of the ninth thinking the game was over. Pinch hitter Travis Ishikawa (who had tied the game with a two-run single) was thrown out at the plate on an infield chopper to David Wright.
[picappgallerysingle id="9377486"]
Replays show that Bay was right, Ishikawa should have been ruled safe, but hey, that’s why they don’t have replay in baseball and that’s why there aren’t 21 perfect games in Major League history.
“When you see the catcher jump you think it’s over,” Bay said. “We had no business losing that game, and at the same time, there was a point we had no business winning that game. We don’t have the luxury when [Johan] Santana gives up one run of not winning his starts.”
Bay, and the rest of the Mets, took advantage of the call to win the game. With two outs in the 10th he singled to center and then was driven home by Ike Davis with a double to deep right center. In the last two games of the series Davis was 5-for-9 with four extra base hits and five RBIs
After blowing the save in the ninth, Francisco Rodriguez got the win by pitching the 10th inning. K-Rod (3-2) made the bottom of the 10th interesting by letting Edgar Renteria double with two-outs, after an intentional walk to Juan Uribe, he got Eli Whiteside to strike out.
The win allowed the Mets to avoid being swept and starting the 11-game West Coast trip on a four game losing streak. They head to Arizona for three games and then to Los Angeles for four more before heading home next Monday.
The Mets will need to find their offense if they hope to turn around the recent struggles. In the last 9 games the Mets have scored just 17 runs, less than two a game. They should count themselves lucky that they were able to win three of those games, each of which was started by Johan Santana.
Mets: …And What Needs To Be
For the Mets to make the playoffs this season, the following things need to happen in the second half.
David Wright continues to be a top-3 MVP candidate.
Tied for the NL lead in RBIs, he leads the Mets in just about every offensive category; hits, doubles, homers, RBIs, on-base, slugging, walks. He’s tied for the team lead in runs and trails Angel Pagan in average by a single percentage point (315 to 314). He’s also going to steal 25+ bases. He has become the leader in the clubhouse and this is clearly his team.
If he gets a couple of walk-off hits down the stretch, continues to produce at his current rate and the Mets make the playoffs, he might become the first Mets MVP.
Johan Santana gets some goddamn run support
The Mets are averaging 2.82 runs in support of Santana and they have scored 2 runs or less in 10 of his 19 starts. Is it any surprise that the Mets are 9-10 in his starts? Recently he took matters into his own hands with his first ever homerun and has hasn’t allowed a run in his past two starts (16 innings). His ERA is 2.98 and ranks 10th in the NL. 10th! Clearly the year of the pitcher is back. Just a few more runs for the Mets ace and he’d be 10-5.
If he gets some more support during the second half of the year and he wins 16-17 games.
Carlos Beltran makes a seamless comeback into the lineup.
Just how good will the former All-Star be when he comes back? The plan is for him to take back his center field spot and move Pagan to right field. Jeff Francoeur would move to the bench, but would join Pagan in a platoon situation. Pagan against righties and Frenchy against lefties. How long is it going to take Beltran to get back to Major League speed? A two-week struggle on the upcoming West Coast trip from Beltran and the Mets could be 10-games back and become players at the trade deadline for the wrong reasons.
If Beltran puts up half a season like 2009 then all will be happy in Metland, if he struggles and hits around .250 people will be pissed.
The back half of the pitching staff holds up
That means that Jon Niese, R.A. Dickey and Hisanori Takahashi continue to pitch well. They won 16 games in starting roles in the first half in 34 starts, but all are untested over a full season in the Major Leagues.
The most innings Niese has ever thrown in the pros is 165 innings and that was two years ago in Double-A, he’s on pace for 180. Will the Mets protect his young arm late in the season, or will they allow him to take the ball every five days?
As a knuckleballer Dickey doesn’t really need to worry about pitching too much, but he’s never thrown more than 120 innings in the majors. The bigger question is will the NL start catching up with his hard knuckler? Will he be as effective the second time through the league?
Japanese rookie Hisanori Takahashi has thrown plenty of innings in Japan and in pennant races. He was a member of three Japanese World Series teams, but will he stand up to September in New York?
If they stay in the rotation for the rest of the season that means 44-45 starts for them and if they pitch as well, that means 20 wins for the trio and 12-14 wins for each of them on the season.
Someone has a great second half to compliment Wright
As in someone I mean Jose Reyes, Jason Bay or Ike Davis. One of these three needs to hit .300 (or somewhat close) and help David Wright carry this team to the next level. He won’t be able to do it alone. Wright may be an All-Star but he hasn’t shown the ability to carry a team all by himself.
If its Reyes, he’ll need to add 20-25 stolen bases and return to the being the most exciting player in the NL again. If its Jason Bay, he’ll have to reach 20 homers on the season and drive in 100 runs. If its Ike Davis, he’ll have to get his average up to .280 and get to 25 homeruns.
The Mets can’t have 10 walk-off losses
Despite the bullpen pitching well, 10 walk-off losses is a complete nightmare. One-quarter of all Mets losses have come in the other teams final at-bat. A recipe for disaster in the regular season and in the playoffs (if they make it), a loss like that in a short playoff series would swing momentum and effectively kill the Mets.
If the Mets cut down on their walk-off losses and have a couple of walk-off wins of their own and its going to be a happy October.
