Well, here’s another 2014 first: the first game that made you want to discover the ability to reach into your TV and smack Mets several time zones away.
This was the game I’d feared the Mets would play on Tuesday in Philadelphia, and was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about [1]: a dead-eyed, slumbering, miscue-filled mess. Every team has a dozen or so of these a year, and it’s better just to avert your eyes and move on as quickly as possible. And so that’s what we’ll do, after a few pro forma observations:
- Sympathies that the Mets sat around in Philadelphia and then flew out at an ungodly hour, arriving in Denver at 5 a.m. But since the game was an early evening affair in Colorado, why the heck didn’t they stay in Philadelphia and leave in the morning? Size of the party to be accommodated? Sleep isn’t necessary for #TrueNewYorkers? EY Jr. knew this awesome breakfast place in Colorado Springs?
- Welp, when Bartolo Colon [2] is bad, he doesn’t pussyfoot around, does he? He’s all-in bad.
- Nice to have Juan Lagares [3] back, who looked as if he’d never left. Can the idea that Eric Young [4] Jr. is anything more than a bench player please progress as soon as possible to the “polite fiction” phase?
- Besides Lagares, Travis d’Arnaud [5] gets a pass for a bolt into the left-field stands that was a no-doubter in any park. Lipstick on a pig, to be sure, but any step in d’Arnaud’s development is something to applaud.
- Keith was a little dull himself tonight, though his ninth-inning fuming about Digger, the Rockies’ annoying mascot, was entertaining. (Oh wait, it’s Dinger. Not that I give a shit.)
Let’s see … that’s 317 words more than I wanted to write about this mess [6] and you wanted to read. Lagares and d’Arnaud, you’re excused. The rest of you fellas take a lap.
Or better yet, go back to sleep.