Well, at least they got a run out of their three hits this time.
The Mets offense continued its deep slumber as the lowly Baltimore Orioles and the lowly Alex Cobb held them completely in check, despite the return to the lineup of Todd Frazier. Jason Vargas had his usual first inning meltdown, surrendering a leadoff single to Trey Mancini on what Josh Lewin called an “85 mile an hour fastball.” At 85 MPH, you’d have to call that a no-movement changeup, wouldn’t you? Adam Jones singled up the middle. I was in the car when all this was going on, and I knew…just knew that with the lethal Manny Machado coming to bat, Vargas would exit the first in a hole. The question was how deep? I found out after I came in from taking the dog for a walk: Machado had singled home Mancini and Danny Valencia hit a sacrifice fly to plate Jones.
To his credit, Vargas settled in after that and the bullpen was nothing short of brilliant. The offense? Not so much. As Wayne Randazzo opined on social media, “The good news is that Jay Bruce has two hits. The bad news is that the rest of his teammates have one.” Their lone run was scratched out in the fifth, when Bruce led off with his second hit of the night. Kevin Plawecki followed with a fine-looking double to left. After Adrian Gonzalez popped out to center, Jose Bautista hit a “Piazza-in-the-2000-World-Series” fly ball to left to score Bruce. That was it. A couple of promising innings were snuffed out by double-plays and general unclutchiness.
Day game tomorrow, Zack Wheeler vs. Dylan Bundy.
Getting sliced and diced by Alex Cobb is a new low in a season full of them. Cobb had given up two or more runs(and mostly way more), and no less than five hits. The Orioles were 4-30 the year when scoring two runs or less and today scored just enough runss and somehow shut down the Mets murders roe offense. Vargas was bad the first two innings but limited the damage and looked fine his next three innings, but he was unlucky to face off with an elite pitcher like Cobb and what can you do? AGone is so bad just so bad. Cabrera since hurting his knee in Milwaukee has been dreadful offensively and defensively. Here is hoping that Nimmo isn’t going into his first slump of the year, imagine the offense somehow getting worse?
This team sucks not much else to say Beyond the Lugo was great again and is so wasted as a reliever.
Mets have no offensive capability. We the diehards are all tired of the lack of run scoring. Time to trade for batting average and timely hitting.
Batting average is a bad stat and timely hitting? This makes no sense.
A loss is a loss. In baseball though, if you lose a 2-1 game to Scherzer, Kershaw or Bumgarner, you say, hey, they battled it out with the best. But losing to a scrub, that’s a different story.
Callaway is in over his head.
I am looking into my black eight ball for our fortune. Ah, yes, yes, I see it now. Alderson looks for bullpen l help. Ah, who I ask. Eight ball says Tim Lincecum. Ah ha ah ha ha. I have to laugh.
Been down this road for many years with the Mets.
I don’t think Alderson will do a total rebuild with the team. He was even quoted as saying that was remote. Doing that would signal that his experiments in frugality has not worked.
We need a rebuild in the front office.
We’re going to score some runs tomorrow, my gut reaction.
If you think we have it badly, take a look across the street at Philadelphia. While I was wallowing in the Mets misery and wondering if Madrigal would fall to them on Monday morning, I caught a snippet of something on one of the ESPN talk shows: The Phillies had scored 1 run in 29 innings. At the time, the Mets had scored 1 in 24 innings, so they were better.
However, what really caught my interest was after Sunday’s game in which Arrieta lost 6-1 while hitting a solo homerun for the only run, he was popping off to the press about the Phillies’ ineptitude offensively and their defensive shifts, which he doesn’t approve of. In fact, that night on MLBN, Pedro Martinez said that for a good pitcher that hits spots like Arietta and Lester (against the Mets) those pitchers don’t like shifts (because they hit spots). It’s the pitchers that don’t hit spots that want the shifts to help them. I would have thought it was the opposite, since a pitcher that can put a ball where he wants can make the hitter hit it into a defensive stack on a shortened field, but it sounded good while he defended some veterans.
Can you imagine if JDG spoke out like Arietta did? Can you imagine the pain in the ass Arietta would have been on the Mets, airing his opinions openly and carried by every big network? Wow.