The funny thing is I’m not sure I actually know what Greg Dobbs looks like.
Ask me to picture Chase Utley or Robinson Cano or Brian McCann or Ryan Zimmermann and I can instantly conjure a mental picture for you. Dobbs? I’ve got nothing except a general impression of squatness.
But maybe that’s appropriate. Just as a tornado or a tidal wave or an earthquake looks different depending on your vantage point, Dobbs looks different depending on what havoc he’s wreaking on the Mets. The constant is that he’s wreaking it.
LaTroy Hawkins’ pitch to Dobbs in the bottom of the eighth — the one he blasted down the right-field line for a three-run homer — was the final one I heard today. I snapped my earphones out of my phone, shut down AtBat and declared the finale of a thoroughly misbegotten Mets-Marlins series over a few minutes before it was actually so [1]. The whole game had been a mess for me anyway — my battery was streaking towards empty and the radio feed kept cutting out, much like the Mets’ hitting, pitching and fielding. And when the Mets were at the plate in the middle innings, even a brief interruption could mean quite a few at-bats disappearing: Between the sixth and the seventh inning the Mets saw a grand total of 11 pitches. They then went down 1-2-3 on 10 pitches in the eighth. Way to make ’em work, fellas.
The rest? Matt Harvey was bad — incredibly and then resignedly. So was Scott Rice. And so was Hawkins. All three of those players have been somewhere between pretty useful and amazing this year, so it’s impossible to get too worked up about bad outings that happened to coincide. But that streak of frantic outmaking is harder to shrug off. And so are the galling misplays by Rick Ankiel and Lucas Duda.
Sigh. It feels like that four-game sweep of the Yankees happened around 140 B.C., doesn’t it?