A few positive developments can be found buried deep within the detritus of the Mets’ otherwise soul-killing 14-inning loss at Arizona Wednesday night.
• Carlos Beltran drove in his first run since September 30 and is now only 43 behind Jason Bay for the season.
• Angel Pagan was one triple shy of a cycle. And Jason Bay was one base short of a single.
• Rod Barajas hit his first home run since the end of May. Jason Bay has yet to hit a home run in a standard National League road ballpark this season.
• Oliver Perez didn’t implode on contact, automatically earning him the status of Best Ex-Pirate On The Mets Who Isn’t Elmer Dessens.
Jason Bay would be the worst.
We all need our scapegoats, and Bay is mine. I’d like to believe it’s temporary, though temporary is suddenly rounding third and heading for August. On a night when few did much and many did little, Bay continued to brave the storm in a skiff made of futility, standing in proximity to home plate six times for no immediately discernible reason. He produced a groundout, reached on an error and then struck out, struck out, struck out and…struck out.
0-for-6 with four strikeouts, none of which came with a Met runner on base, which prevents me, in all good conscience, from picketing the team hotel in L.A. this morning while chanting:
HEY, HEY, JASON BAY!
HOW MANY METS DID YOU STRAND TODAY?
I am the proud owner of a Jason Bay bobblehead, and every day I stare at it and wonder what the hell it’s doing here. That is, why did the Mets choose to make Jason Bay their poster doll for 2010? Oh, right, because, in addition to showing next to no marketing imagination, they threw $66 million at him in late 2009 and are obligated to propagate the pretense that he is a star.
He’s not a star. He’s not much of anything at the moment, but when he’s not sucking like Jason Bay has sucked as a Met, he is, I sort of recall, not as bad as Jason Bay has been. But I’m in possession of his rather bland ceramic figure just as the Mets are stuck with his fabulously extravagant contract through 2013. Until then, they can throw it on the pile over there with Castillo’s, Perez’s and that clever quarter-century buyout genius Steve Phillips cooked up for Bobby Bonilla.
The whole team’s been Bayish, of course. The Diamondbacks were rumored to be horrendous, yet they’re 3-0 since the Mets passed through Phoenix on their way to nowhere. That bullpen of theirs was supposed to be the most flammable item since Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, but it extinguished every Met hope for three nights. Then this series ends with Chris Snyder smacking a ball over the head of — who else? — Jason Bay in the fourteenth. Best thing you can say regarding the losing run is Kirk Gibson didn’t drive it over the fence in the twelfth.
I’m sure the Mets aren’t any happier than they’ve made us. And if they are, Alex Cora will be certain to dampen their mood even further. “Have some respect!” Cora chided giggling reporters and maybe Mike Pelfrey in the Met clubhouse Tuesday night.
Score some runs, Mets fans chided back.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by You Gotta Believe!, Greg Prince. Greg Prince said: Hey, hey, Jason Bay, how many #Mets did you strand today? http://wp.me/pKvXu-1Dn [...]
I’ll accept Alex Cora chewing out his teammates for not taking the game seriously when he gets his OPS over .400. I mean, whatever success this team has had this year has a lot more to do with Pelfrey than it does with Cora, who really is not much good at anything other than running his mouth and probably does the team more harm than good, at least on the field.
On the other hand, he can chew out snotty reporters all he wants, far as I’m concerned.
Hey. At least I can catch up on my reading now. (No Bay of Pigs reference? Man, you really Bayed up that opportunity.)
Bay-a culpa.
As always, an excellent post.
I had a different take on the game.
http://www.citifieldnine.com/2010/07/mets-tear-out-my-heart-again.html/
F#@k “Woodchuck Head” Jason Bay. And while we’re at it, f#@k Jerry “Goofy Glasses” Manuel, Frankie “the Fly” Rodriguez, Mike “Big Galoot” Pelfrey, Jeff “Mr. Personality” Francoer, Alex “Future Manager” Cora, Carlos “Too Cool for School, Called Third Strike” Beltan, Louis “Gimp” Castillo, Rod “Pulled Foul” Barajas, and a big double f#@k you to Ollie and Omar, both of whom are so execrable they do not deserve a nickname.
So how’s that “fatttening up on the teams with the worst records in the NL” strategy working out so far? Ugh.
The ship be sinking.
You could hide your Jason Bay bobblehead from view with your Frankie Rodriguez t-shirt.
But then I’d never decipher BobbleBay’s mystery.
And who’s to say I’m not wearing RODRIGUEZ 75 right now?
Ahhhh, damn it. Things were going so well. I mean yeah, I deep down knew they’d never seriously contend this year, but I did think they were capable of making things interesting through August, at least. It felt like such a step forward, positives that were actually being built upon, hope for the future, all that good stuff.
Now all of a sudden Pelfrey is “dead-armed” and looks like hell. Beltran is so far subtraction by addition. Likewise Castillo. And Ollie’s back, which you can be sure will lead to nowhere good. Bay is George Foster’s white doppleganger. The baseball is annoying, boring, frustrating and bad. I guess I shouldn’t complain, a few months of quality baseball is more than lots of other teams get, but still, this particular nosedive has been really deflating.
I watch these Mets at-bats much the same way Princess Leia watched Han Solo fly the Millennium Falcon: You know the promised jump to light speed ain’t gonna work.
[...] Bay, Way to Go by Greg Prince on 24 July 2010 3:21 am The great thing about having a scapegoat is giving him up. Jason Bay, I hereby release you from all the blame for the Mets’ season having [...]