Except for the top of the sixth inning, Friday night at Citi Field was a pretty good game. The Mets scored five runs versus the Tampa Bay Rays and received five solid innings from Clay Holmes. Gotta like things of that nature occurring.
It’s a shame the top of the sixth, when Paul Blackburn and Max Kranick gave up the six runs that negated the 5-1 lead the Mets had built and essentially undid Holmes’s splendid limited-by-design start, had to happen. Otherwise, though, good game.
Well, maybe the bottom of the seventh inning lacked whatever makes a game good, as the bottom of the seventh wasn’t much of a half-inning from a Mets perspective. Loading the bases was excellent. Leaving them loaded — against Edwin Uceta [1], an ex-Met you blinked and missed in 2023 — was less excellent. Earlier, the Rays deployed Eric Orze [2] out of the bullpen. You might have blinked and missed Eric when he was a Met last year. Anyway, good game, except for the top of the sixth and the bottom of the seventh.
Actually, the bottoms of the eighth and the ninth weren’t so great, either. In the eighth, Juan Soto rocketed a ball to right that somehow neither went out nor fell in. Looked promising off the bat, but it was just a third out. And the ninth was promising, too, right up to Ronny Mauricio striking out looking with the tying runs on base. Those could have been good innings for the Mets. Real good. But they weren’t.
Friday night wound up Rays 7 Mets 5, with the Mets stranding a dozen and going 2-for-16 with runners in scoring position while middle relief absolutely imploded. So maybe it wasn’t a good game [3]. After winning six in a row, it’s hard to remember the Mets sometimes play games that qualify as less than good.