Re Tuesday’s game: Blah blah blah Michael Wacha blah blah blah Orioles blah blah Robert Gsellman blah blah blah blah blah blah five games under .500 blah blah blah blah blah sinking fast.
I could have expanded that to 800 words, but why? Here’s the only analysis that matters: The Mets have 30 percent of a starting pitching staff. Jacob deGrom is Jacob deGrom, whose only flaw is he can’t start the other 80 percent of his team’s games. Seth Lugo is a solid starting pitcher who’s still ramping up to the pitch count demanded, and with a bad elbow. David Peterson is learning to navigate his first big-league season. Steven Matz has disintegrated and vanished. Wacha and Rick Porcello have struggled to pitch around the giant forks sticking out of their backs. Meanwhile, Noah Syndergaard‘s UCL exploded, Marcus Stroman opted out and Zack Wheeler was allowed to go to Philadelphia with no resistance from the Mets, unless catty quotes to beat reporters count.
In a given five-day stretch the Mets can count on a reliable start the first day, hope for one the second day, hold their breath the third day, and on the fourth and fifth days they brace for impact the moment the starter makes contact with the rubber. That’s a fatal flaw for any baseball team with contending hopes in a normal season and it sure looks like an equally fatal one in this weirdo season. Which makes sense: two hoary pieces of baseball wisdom hold that you never have enough starting pitching and momentum is the next day’s starter. Both of those have been proved correct repeatedly this year, beginning with the Mets surveying their wrecked rotation and carrying through with the Mets’ inability to get on any kind of a roll, largely because they’re down by three or four runs before the fifth inning more often than not.
Baseball teams can tinker around the margins and fix stuff, but there aren’t enough shovels to fill a crater in the middle of a starting rotation. You can’t patchwork enough relief to fix it, you can’t reliably outhit it, and no number of socially distanced team meetings, overturned Zoom cameras or lineup tweaks will make it go away. Which means that every other problem, ultimately, is just so much blah blah blah.
yup. a pitiful state of affairs even by mets standards.
baseball-free covid life had me riding the bike 3x a week, the baseball couch no option til july.
i often resisted this cut-out fan, roar-tracking and all that but the fact that the season was already nearly ending as it began (and thus no baseball again for *at least* a srmrabdard off -season), and those few heroic wins had me believin’ (TM) just enough to disrupt a productive workout routine.
but yes, this season is lost with the mets current staff.
tonite will resist the couch in favor of the saddle.
a nice one on tom terrific:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/08/tom-terrific-passes-on/
the pic tom’s daughter posted made me sad. far from being a ghost of his former self, tom looked warm and present, and his grey locks unfussy and rockstar like. made me all the sadder.
We can only have 1 good pitcher at a time. Can’t afford any more. While other teams are willing to pay market price to bolster their rotations with high quality pitching, we are the bargain-bin, used, open-box, scratch ‘n dent, lower quality version of baseball. As a fan, it’s pretty frustrating. Getting Noah back will help.
Blah blah lost season blah blah no starters bullpen sucks blah dee dee blah COVID season so it doesn’t matter anyway blah can’t wait for Cohen and end of Brody van blahdeblah.
Pretty tough to win many games when you have exactly one dependable pitcher on the roster.
…who, one or two laughers a year aside, gets less run support day in, day out, than his arond-1.70 ERA indicates he needs…..
“In a given five-day stretch the Mets can count on a reliable start the first day, hope for one the second day” – I talked with a friend about something entirely different (Ferrari’s firestorm of a Formula 1 season), and we boiled it down to this wisdom: > Hope is for those that have no reason to be confident < … and here's your 2020 Mets!
Matzie's demise makes me sad the most. Always liked the guy. (stirs with a long stick in the clump of ashes left behind)
And yet, there's still teams superficially worse than the Mets. I mean, at least we got some good offense. No pitching, no defense, plenty of soap opera distractions, but the offense clicks (sometimes)! Wednesday I watched the only day game, Tigers getting slaughtered 19-0 by the Brew Crew. And that wasn't even the worst beating on the day (Fish got stuck 29 by the Barves). And YET … those two shambles outfits are closer to the playoffs than the Mets.
Your either looking at major league players in decline or minor league players pressed into service..Funny how we have been so willing to accept this mediocrity on a daily basis..
Maybe they should keep the short regular season in the future and keep the expanded playoff format to gin up interest in this game today..
Braves scored 29 runs last night..!!