One of my favorite moments from last year's ALCS (The Mets were out of it! It was against the Yankees! It was just postseason baseball — It didn't MEAN anything!) came after Keith Foulke preserved a decidedly shaky save in Game 6. As he lined up to slap hands with his teammates, who looked a little weak in the knees, he grinned broadly and announced, “Well, that got interesting.”
Tonight got interesting.
This sounds ungrateful, but while Jae Seo's much-improved location, better smarts around the strike zone and apparent decision to accept coaching are all wonderful things, that sounded like somewhat sketchy one-hit ball. Balls that got hit awful hard just stayed in and unlikely fielders made really good plays — except for the small matter of the results, it didn't seem night and day removed from his lackluster start in D.C. So don't count me among those ready to take to the barricades because Seo is going back to Norfolk. (Of course I'd send Glavine and/or Zambrano there instead if that were possible.) Nor would I have been that up in arms if Victor Diaz were Virginia-bound. (He's not — Royce Ring got his walking papers.) Victor has some more fielding lessons to learn, not to mention getting a fair amount better at staying up to date on what's going on around him. Granted, it seems questionable that he has anything to learn at the plate in AAA — pitchers have adjusted to him and one hopes tonight was him starting to adjust back — but playing every day in AAA seems more conducive to learning than riding the bench in the Show.
Unless, of course, we trade Cameron. It's kind of nice to think that the Yankees desperately need a center fielder and we're about to have two of them, including the one they should have employed. Sorry Cash, we'd love to help you out, but this farm system of yours looks like the Island of Misfit Toys. Call us in a few drafts — if you're still around.
The dessert accompanying tonight's game was various Mets being quotable. (Oh, and watching YES.) First was Floyd admitting that his jog to the fence on Jason Michaels' non-homer was “a courtesy run-back” for Seo on a ball he thought was gone, after which Clifford thought to himself, “Oh crap, I'm going to have to jump and try to catch that.” Seo (through a translator) said all the right things about helping the team, blah blah blah, and Randolph got in a not-bad crack about Seo's demotion: “Maybe if he threw a no-hitter, I might have had second thoughts. Certainly a perfect game, that's really impressive.”
In my baseball universe, all these zingers would be worth at least a game in the standings.
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