The Mets said all the right things after getting beaten by the Rays 8-5 on Tuesday night in a game that was not nearly as close as the final score suggests. Justin Verlander talked about understanding the fans’ frustration and about how the players were frustrated too and about needing to work hard. Buck Showalter talked about worms turning but didn’t sugarcoat all the things that seem to be going wrong all at once. It all sounded good, but if you zoomed out from trees to forest, the vibe was essentially that the beatings will continue until morale improves. And when exactly will that be? The starting pitchers are dropping their teammates in holes early, the hitters have stopped hitting and so are unable to slug their way out of those holes, and this dreary blueprint is followed pretty much daily, leaving the games sour and unwatchable.
Predictably, a Mets team that had just been steamrolled by the not very good Nationals found the Rays a tough matchup. Right now the Rays are pretty much a perfect baseball team: They ground down Verlander, a surefire Hall of Famer even if he won’t wear our uniform on his plaque, until he was forced to make hitters’ pitches, which the Rays didn’t miss. Meanwhile the Mets hit three home runs, which is three more than they hit in Washington, but that was all they did, and this moderate uprising never really felt like a serious threat — frankly, it was a lot of lipstick to waste on one pig. The Mets got screwed on a replay challenge at first, they got booed repeatedly by the faithful, and in the last few innings SNY treated us to about 200 shots of Mets fans looking outraged, astonished, morose or catatonic.
If that’s the scale, I think right now I’m somewhere between the last stages of astonished and early-onset morose — the Rays are a fantastic baseball team, the Mets are a tire fire, and it’s a little like the unstoppable force and the unmovable object if you switched the polarity of one of those entities so that both were pushing in the same direction, which is to say away from the Mets conceivably winning anything. I mean, Starling Marte looks done, Mark Canha remains a shell of his 2022 self, Daniel Vogelbach‘s best moment was cheering a teammate, Francisco Alvarez‘s swing is getting worrisomely long again, Drew Smith had a fit in the dugout … it’s bad, y’all.
Congratulations to Josh Walker, I guess, for becoming the 1,200th Met all time. Now that Walker is a made man, though, he’s strongly advised to run like hell away from this Baseball Chernobyl. Maybe see if Tampa Bay could use another arm — those guys look like they’re going places.
As bad as the pitching has been, watching Mets pitchers work is still more interesting than watching Mets hitters. That’s how sad this story is… Baseball Chernobyl could lead to a nuclear winter.
I’ve been getting ridiculed since last year about this….but it’s very simple. Players age. Old players do not maintain dominance no matter who they are. The mets paid a lot of money for guys who were due for a breakdown at any moment ….and were idiots to think that they wouldn’t. They also filled in the gaps with throw away gap,fillers like canha and voggle. You can’t buy championships in baseball without trading your top prospects so the mets were stuck with a weak free agent market. This team was destined for ruin and a useless hack like billy eppler facilitated it. Really sad
At the end of top 8, Smith and Alvarez had what looked like a heated exchange while entering dugout. I looked around, couldn’t find any news on this. Just curious, anyone see anything?
It would be hard to make this stuff up, right? It’s like the Rays came in and said “OK, we’ll show you what you can do with your half a billion,” then took the Mets apart piece by piece and then beat us senseless with the pieces.