Prior to Wednesday night’s game at Arizona, the Mets players held a 15-minute team meeting to address their recent struggles and map out a plan to rectify their losing ways.
The meeting may help out in the long run, but after a grueling 14-inning affair on Wednesday night the Mets were swept by the lowly Diamondbacks in heartbreaking fashion. Wednesday’s defeat was the Mets 11th walk-off loss. This west-coast road trip is amounting to be a disaster. The Mets have lost six of seven games to start off the second half.
When will this end? When is enough, enough?
Hand it to utility man Alex Cora for showing some guts in calling out some reporters on Tuesday night. It was first believed that Cora was calling out his teammates for laughing after a loss, but Cora was showing anger at reporters and media who were laughing and enjoying themselves too much. Cora has had enough of the ‘aw shucks whatever’ attitude that has been festering in the Mets locker room.
The Mets players have to be held accountable and have to realize the urgency of the season at this point. I assume that was the tone of the meeting. Too bad the immediate result was another tough loss.
For a moment in Wednesday’s game it looked liked some of that spunk was back for the Mets. With the Mets trailing 3-2 in the 6th inning, Rod Barajas belted a game tying home run to snap out of his own slump and give the team some life. From there the bullpen stepped up for seven scoreless innings, with Oliver Perez of all people even getting out of jams, but could not go any further after Fernando Nieve gave up two big hits in the 14th to lose the game.
The guts the Mets showed late in the game was refreshing, but this is a team that is struggling mightily to score runs and something must be done.
As Brian Joura pointed out in Wednesday’s post, maybe it is time the Mets look to get some offense before the trading deadline. Somebody needs to light a fire under the team. It may be drastic, but desperate times call for desperate measure and maybe just maybe the Mets should look into firing Howard Johnson.
There is just no life in the Mets bats right now and a change, any change, might be necessary. I love Johnson, and he is a Met legend, but change for the sake of change might be the way to go.
I am not suggesting that they definitely should dump HoJo, but someone needs to be held accountable. Looking at the way Jason Bay, Ike Davis and Rod Barajas are swinging lately is like watching a train wreck.
I have already stated numerous times how the Mets need some pitching, and still do, but I agree some changes or tweaks have to be made on offense in order to save this apparently sinking ship.
Maybe it’s just the west coast that is not agreeing with the Mets and all they need is some home cooking. However, do remember when the Mets come home on Monday they will open against baseball’s hottest team in the St. Louis Cardinals (currently on an eight-game winning streak).
It’s sink or swim time for the Mets, and the team must treat the Dodger series as being thrown a life preserver, with winning two games being a must. One win against the Dodgers would be very disheartening. Getting swept by the Dodgers might as well be considered catastrophic.
It’s sink time. The Mets have not scored more than four runs in a game since July 5th. Yesterday they couldn’t mount a single threat in five extra innings. Tonight’s blanking is just indicative of this entire Western road trip. Unfortunately our miserable, meek, listless Mets are have sunk to a season low.
This is a VERY big series for our boys…. and it didn’t start well.
I do think that we are seeing the beginning of the end. The team hasn’t played good ball in almost a month.
We were treated to a nice run earlier in the season, but I think we can all see now that the team was playing over their heads. The pitching, that we thought was too good to be true was just that….
We caught some lightning in a bottle.
Unless the team can start clicking offensively, we are going to go out silently.
Jerry has GOT to be sweating.