The Mets are in first place and the ship is not listing. But what ails this team is something that is sensed more than it’s been seen. Something is out of kilter — perhaps an approach to hitting, an approach to competing, an approach to winning.
That was Bill Rhoden in this morning's Times, and it was well-said. Not being able to put your finger on exactly what is wrong with this team doesn't mean you don't know something's amiss. And tonight was an example. Taken piece by piece, the loss doesn't seem so dire. Brandon Phillips had a career night. Maine hadn't pitched in forever. Lo Duca's hitting in lousy luck. Gotay hit in lousy luck. Hey, Harang's their ace. Milledge looked good again. Mota and Schoeneweis and Heilman all had decent outings. And did you see that play Wright made?
Finding all the positives, you might miss the pesky little negative: That we lost, 8-4, and are now a bad weekend away from second place. Which is our last line of defense — take away first place and you might indeed start saying, “Hey, cap'n, this ship seems to be riding a little lower to starboard than it is to port.”
Over the last week I repeatedly stopped and started a post grappling with the question Rhoden alludes to. My premise was that what's wrong with the 2007 Mets is really nothing more than the fact that they're not the 2006 Mets, that that season's runaway success sprinkled pixie dust in our eyes and made us fail to appreciate this season, in which a first-place team will be reinforced with a brace of important players returning from the DL, among them one Pedro J. Martinez.
I think I know why I never finished that post: On some level I knew it wasn't true. As a wise man once said, you could look it up. On June 2 the Mets were 34-18, 16 games over .500. Today they're 49-40. In between, the record is a putrid 15-22. Thirty-seven games is nearly a quarter of a season — time enough to say that yes, something is wrong. We can argue about what that something is, but it's pretty clear it's more than just an absence of pixie dust.
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