Wheelin' and Dealin' (And Crushin' it, Too)

After a night where I watched a game on TV for the first time all season, I was back to the radio waves, which I certainly don't mind given we have a great radio tandem in Howie Rose and Wayne Randazzo. Though you can certainly have the game on in the background when taking in SNY, the radio lends itself to multitasking better than the visual distraction that respective broadcast can be. I appreciated being able to just relax and take in only the baseball in front of me Monday night, and the Mets, who looked rather lackadaisical on the road, seemed to perk up being at home in the Citi, which is never a given the way things have gone over our ballpark's first decade.

Frank Franklin II/AP
Photo via nytimes.com

They've had a habit lately of winning the first game only to fall flat the next two, so they needed to show us that energy Monday night was not an isolated incident. Behind the literal strength of the blossoming Zack Wheeler, they were able to carry themselves to a 9-0 win, sealing the series victory in the process. I had to head to bed around 8:30, but the radio was obviously left on, allowing me to doze off with the sounds of two homers.

Firstly, Zack Wheeler's, whose jack was a beautiful sight once I was able to see the highlight this morning, taking it the other way impressively in that cavernous outfield. He took matters into his own hands earlier with a double that put us on the board, while simultaneously shutting down a Phillies team who got called out by their resident veteran, Jake Arrieta, for a lack of energy in Monday's game (as well as chiding Bryce Harper for putting himself in a position to not be an on-field factor the remainder of that game.)

When Zack is lit on the mound, he is so much fun to watch. The ball just zips out of his hands and the confidence he exudes is palpable. He has crept up incrementally on the starting pitching depth chart. Friendly competition would be lovely from Syndergaard right about now...

Secondly, the last thing I consciously took in was Todd Frazier's grand slam, more or less sealing the outcome of this game. I like Frazier. There. I said it. I know people are low on him because of the large contract and his generally low batting average, but it isn't a bad thing to have a power-laden veteran of his caliber if he can obviously not be a black hole out there (whether it is starting or off the bench.) No, he should clearly not be taking AB's away from Jeff McNeil right now and I prefer McNeil's defense at 3rd rather than in the outfield. Frazier, however, is defensively a good 3rd baseman as well (even though Jeff is a McRevelation out there right now.) If they can make the mix work, more power to them. Last night, it worked wonders.

It is time to press down on the Phillies' necks and sweep this series. This is how you should be performing at home. While Jacob Rhame throwing behind Rhys Hoskins' back was, I think we can all agree, a message after a few of our batters got hit on Monday (and we lead the league in that category so far this year) we have to make sure it isn't a letdown game with the Phillies jacked to retaliate to the perceived "not fair form" and obviously with our resident worst starter on the mound in Jason Vargas.

DON'T. LET. UP. NOW.

LET'S. GO. METS.

#5thStarterIssues

I believe the Mets to be good. Ya Gotta. 

I think what they have shown us so far is much more reason to be optimistic than last year's above-their-heads 11-1 start. The offense has had a fantastic approach, seemingly attacking in ways the opposition cannot continuously adjust around. Usually, when a team is making a run, the starting rotation is lucky to have two aces at the top with the other 3 pretty good to round it out. It is a blessing, of course, that we have 4 horses that could potentially in the long run be other team's best.

John Amis/Getty Images
Photo via amazinavenue.com

The 5th starter, however, is not supposed to be this freakin' awful. Many of us all offseason long were screaming that no matter how Jason Vargas seemed to get better in the 2nd half of the season last year, we all expected him to resort to the atrocious pitching he presented at the beginning of it. He wasn't all that good in his first start and he was skipped to keep our better pitchers (cough cough deGrom) on a regular pitching schedule with so many off days early on. So, maybe he was a little rusty, but excuses excuses excuses. This world hates them (no matter how hypocritical each of us are and how often we seem to make them) and you have to adjust to what is thrown your way. His throwing was so bad he was taken out in the 1st with clearly no faith he would get back on track.

Post-game, Jason Vargas made the excuse that he wasn't out there long enough to make an overall assessment of his pitching. Oh, please. This isn't the type of talk fans want to hear and most likely not the type of talk teammates or coaches want to hear either.

There isn't an easy fix, no matter how much we keep screaming for Dallas Keuchel. That would be INSANELY AWESOME. This is the Wilpons, however, we're talking about. They do not operate in the same operational plane that most successful teams do. Signing him would not only most likely sure up our potential success but prevent our divisional rivals from swooping in to counter our attack with the pitcher of topic. It's crazy that a former Cy Young award winner, and one who hasn't had a drop off in performance of Matt Harvey territory, is still out there on the free agent market along with an elite closer of Craig Kimbrel's ilk. At this point, give a kid down in Syracuse a chance instead of someone who wants to keep making these excuses. We all will make excuses, but we have to continue to check ourselves and make less and less of them as time goes on.

Maybe one day, the Wilpons themselves will heed those words as well.

GIVE. US. KEUCHEL.

LET'S. GO. METS.

The Comeback That Twasn't

I desperately wish I had more time to take in every aspect of the Mets I possibly can right now. It is such a welcome distraction, even when they lose. 

Even when they lose, I can take solace in the fact it isn't taxes, or bills overdue, or my dad's pancreatic cancer. My dad and I didn't religiously watch baseball together after I left the Yankees behind, but he was never a die-hard to begin with. As I said in the opening post of this blog, he was a die-hard fan of me and my passion for baseball, which led him to fan the budding flame in my bar mitzvah year of life, age 13. Last year, after his Whipple surgery fell apart when it was discovered cancer cells had metastasized on his abdomen, rendering the surgery moot, one of my favorite memories I have was watching the Mets blow a game. I obviously wasn't happy that they blew the lead and subsequently the season, but just like his cancer, my dad and I were able to shake our heads and laugh it off, wondering just how much Mrs. Lincoln liked the play before her husband, Abraham's, head was blown off.

Mike Stobe/Getty Images
Photo via https://www.federalbaseball.com

So, my intake of the Mets failed comeback attempt in yesterday's series losing loss to the Nationals was taken in as such before and during my driving Lyft: 0-0, 5-1, 12-2 then the final of 12-9 after Michelle Ioannou, my former Rising Apple colleague, informed me of the failed comeback via the following tweets:

yup, mets lost, but damn they went down fighting

— Michelle Ioannou (@mnioannou) April 7, 2019

There are many concerns of what we are seeing here. Zack Wheeler reverting back to post-last-year's-second-half form, the bullpen overall not performing well, (insert usual Mets concerns here), etc, etc....but the offense is not currently one of them. There may be isolated concerns in regards to the latter, like Brandon Nimmo's bat disappearing or Robinson Cano's overall slow start, but so far, Chili Davis's affect is being immediately felt with player's like Jeff McNeil, who we had faith would continue to perform as he did last year, Pete Alonso, who is absolutely crushing it in his first go-round that appears much more sustainable than any Jeff Francoeur-type hot start, and JD Davis, who may just be hitting himself into a sustained bench role when players like Todd Frazier and Jed Lowrie come back from the...ugh, I'm going to write it this way, aren't I?...the Injured List (It still feels like the disabled list in my head but I'm trying to train myself not to be a crusty old man about everything these days.)

Life may pile on hard, but at least we can laugh, love and live with the Mets, win or lose.

LIFE. GOES. ON. NOW.

LET'S. GO. METS.

Their Mlicki Game

Once upon a time, at the dawn of interleague play, a man rose to shut down the defending champion Yankees in the very first regular season Subway Series game of all time.

The Mets lost the next two.

MANDATORY CREDIT: Brad Penner, USA TODAY Sports

Nobody remembers that.

And in this new age of New York baseball, when Yankee fans look back at the dawn of this new era, they'll remember fondly how the other New York team came into their stadium looking to break their winning streak record with their defending Rookie of the Year on the mound, and got knocked around 6-1.

They'll casually brush over how the Mets took the next two.

We'll look back at when the 2015 New York Mets started a new streak.

#HappyHarveyDay

LET'S. GO. METS.

For the First time since 1918...?

So, get this....

And I thought about it a bit before the series was definitely heading back to Fenway, but now we're on the possible brink.

And I didn't think about all these little details till last night...

Firstly,  the 2 losses the Red Sox have in this 109th edition of the Fall Classic are their first World Series losses since Game 7 of 1986.

They swept their last 2 series, and had home field advantage in both, meaning they clinched on the road every time.

SO, they now have a chance to win a World Series at Fenway for the first time since beating the Chicago Cubs at home in Game 6 of the 1918 World Series by a score of 2-1.

How about that?

That's pretty damn cool for Red Sox fans, though obviously, and they are well aware, everything could crash and burn. Don't think for one second those fans are saying to themselves, "Well, we've had the spoils after going 86 years, it's not gonna feel as sweet." They very well know, #1, how hard it is to win a World Series, and #2, how long it could be till they're back.

So, take the bull by the horns.

And beat dem Redbirds to oblivion.

Here's the Random Song of the Day.

WAIT. TILL. NEXT. YEAR.

LET'S. GO. METS.

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Random Funk Late Night

LET'S. GO. METS.

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Waking Up With Coco and More James Brown

Well, this is baseball. That's why this is the greatest game of all, ya know. Looked like we were gonna get it, we didn't do it, we didn't quite get the 27 outs, that's part of the game. You're gonna get tested all the time in this game, and it's a good test. We're down to, basically, like the wild card situation was now: 1 game. Pretty simple. We played our hearts out, tonight we just didn't close it out."

--Jim Leyland, Post-Game Conference

Early morning, I tried real hard to make it through to the last out of the last ball game. After Raul didn't take a hanging slider in the 9th and a high fastball in the 12th, the remote landed on the A's Tigers game for the rest of the evening. I actually did an admiral job staying up until the 9th. I must have made it an out or 2 into the top frame, and then naturally dosed off the way a normal human on the eastern seaboard would do around 12:30 in the morning. At what appeared to be the stroke of 1, I woke up to see every member of the A's running out of their dugout towards Coco Crisp on the infield. I didn't see his game-winning hit live, just on every replay after. The frenzy must have woken me up. There was really no reason to doubt that the A's would have that game won by the time I woke up, but for some odd reason I really thought the Tigers would lock the series down during my slumber. 

What a day of baseball ahead of us. Got two Game 5's with Bay Series Implications, and a couple Game 4's involving two Beltway teams with their backs against the wall. Should be quite an awesome-but-would-be-awesomer-with-Orange-and-Blue day.

Here's More James Brown.

LET'S. GO. METS.

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Miller Park: The Anti-Voodoo

On the night of the second performance of The Zeal, and with the 1 train delayed because of "a police investigation at Christopher Street," the commencement of the evening happened around 10 minutes after the game's beginning. The Mets already had runners on 2nd and 3rd with 1 out when I got to my At Bat plugged in underneath the stage, where there was a spot for me to follow what I could out of the way of everyone. With how the Mets have been scoring runs at home (or how they haven't been scoring runs) you'll take the RBI groundout by Ike. A greater bonus having The Duda...well...you know...Abide.

That was basically the way the evening went for me. Whenever I checked in, they would score immediately thereafter. Completely the opposite of every update I got during the week's rehearsals. The next time I got a chance to check up on the game after The Duda drove in Wright, the first update said, "In Play, run(s)," with Murph up. I thought to myself, "Man, I hope Murph just blasted a 2-runner." Sure enough, he had. While I also saw the Brew Crew score their runs via the words on the page, The Duda Abided once more for my next update, with his solo blast plastered across the screen the second I picked up the phone again. That top of the 6th was lovely. Josh Thole driving in Torres, Ruben Tejada driving in Thole. I had forgotten what the number 7 looked like.

Maybe we needed to be actually performing the show instead of rehearsing for the Mets to actually score some runs.

Maybe I needed to not check the At Bat in front of the Big Bad Baseball Gypsy, which is what I didn't do when I saw him walking by.

Maybe Citi Field is in some weird 2nd half-killing Bermuda Triangle or something.

Oooooooooorrr maaaaaaaaaaaaybeeeeeeeee the Mets just played the game of baseball better than the Brew Crew yesterday evening.

Oh, superstition.

Around the 6th or 7th inning, we got to a bar.

"Hey, bar..... Is there anyone watching the Tennis Channel or 10 Things We Love About Tim Tebow on the NFL Network? I'd love to watch the Mets Game."

My eyes can't roll back any further.

LET'S. GO. METS.

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Figures.

I really didn't have too much to say about last night's game (which might be because I have too much to say about last night's game.) Apparently not being able to go more than a day without writing at least two words in the body of these posts, I present to you the Random Song of the Day (which is actually 2.)

LET'S. GO. METS.

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And That's EXACTLY What We Needed.

The leader of this squad, David Wright, would not let the losing streak continue. His 1st inning home run after Andres Torres beat out a grounder helped set the tone for not only a much needed win, but a much-needed offensive explosion after slumping the past couple games. Wright blasted a 3-run shot later as well, carrying the Mets to a 9-5 win this afternoon at our nation's capital.

RA Dickey was not at his 1-hitter best, but he gave us 7 1/3 solid innings of 3-run ball to hold off the tough Nationals' offense. The bullpen was still kinda shaky, but they did not allow the Nats to get within one huge blast of tying the game. We need to see them be perfect in close ones, but for today, their performance will clearly suffice since they locked down RA's 13th W. I can only imagine the scene tomorrow at Citi had the bullpen blown that one.

Nice solo shot, Ike.

This was a massively important win, and props to the Mets for responding. Time to play solid, crisp baseball against the Dodgers. Tomorrow night, Johan will take on Aaron Harang at 7:10PM before people run as fast as they can after the last pitch to avoid hearing Daughtry.

Keep it up, Metsies.

LET'S. GO. METS.

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Well, That Sucked.

I had a much closer look at that weekend than I expected. Completely forgetting that their is no Major League Baseball team other than the Braves near most Southeastern states, I was able to view the majority of all games on Fox and their Sports South affiliate.

In no way did the weekend suck, as we were able to make a 6-minute film in 48 hours with my girlfriend's brother in Alabama. The only thing that sucked was the Mets' circumstances witnessed. We flew in to Nashville Friday afternoon, were picked up by said brother and driven to Numynd Studios to receive the packet needed to complete the 48-Hour Film Race. In the movie, there had to be a blender, a gym teacher named Fritz or Frieda, and the line, "We need to get going." The genre assigned was, "Film De Femme," a genre they invented.  We then drove 2 hours to the Space Capital of the Nation, Huntsville, AL. Brainstorming as we rode, we attempted to come up with an idea before we got home. I really wanted to go with the killer blender who keeps showing up wherever a strong female lead goes (cancha see it?) The ideas were flowing from everyone as the Orange and Blue got started with their 2nd half in ATL. Having to make a film with the Mets a lot closer than I expected them to be was a great test of my willpower to keep my composure. In retrospect, I'm happy to have endured that. Yeah, I could have saved myself some grief by avoiding contact and concentrating fully on the film, but my fandom wouldn’t allow it. Let recap the weekend:

 

• The MLB Radio App was not working, and according to Twitter, other people were having the same problem. I followed the first moments of Game 1 from mostly Tweets and Gamecast. As I read of the happenings, the scoreboard froze on Josh Thole's strike 1 call in the 2nd. I couldn't understand why it wasn't updating until I went to Twitter and saw reports of the power going out at the Ted. It finally turned on as we were halfway to 'Bama. The Mets came storming back until they decided to come to a stand still with the bases loaded and none out in the 5th. Uncharacteristic of a team we've come to expect more from. While there are plenty of spots to point at as to where the Mets lost this game, that moment was single-handedly the spot where they definitively weren't going to win. I watched the rest at their house before we pre-produced till 3 in the morning. Once we thought we had an idea we could all agree with (“We’ve got killer blender…I’m just sayin’…) we went to sleep until the crack of 9 to begin production on our 48-hour film. 

• We woke up the next morning and readied the equipment into the car. Other cast and crew members arrived, and we ventured out into the hills of Alabama, looking for cliff-like scenery in an Monte Sano State Park. There were possible thunderstorms rolling in around mid-afternoon, so it was important to get the exteriors done before then. We were finished there by 2:30 or so, Central Time, and headed down to get some interior shots. We arrived just in time for the game to be on in the background while we filmed. All around the house we shot until it was time for a “fiancé and his friends” scene in the living room. As Bobby Parnell blew it, I sat there as one of the fiancé's “friends.” Talk about keeping composure while filming a movie (we ended up scraping that scene for a “fiancé and his friends leaving the house to go party” scene. I bet I look real pissed in the living room dailies.) After filming till around 10, we loaded the footage onto the computer. It took about an hour, so we watched the comedy of Tom Wilson. Apparently, Biff’s a comedian. Pretty funny. Check it out on Netflix.  Afterwards, I looked for some royalty-free music we could use from the collection of Kevin MacLeod (nice variety if you're ever looking for some tight, free music.) Once we had all the footage up there, we did the basic framework of the editing before going to sleep around 2.

• We woke up rather early to edit, sitting around the computer before her brother went to church at 9. He arrived back at 12:30 and joined the river mid-stream. At 1:30, I naturally turned the TV on so I could periodically check the game from the editing room. Turned out I could see 25% of the TV screen from the room. In that 25% view was CB Bucknor’s strike zone and the damage thereafter. Truthfully, the large lead and the disappointment that followed allowed me to go more than 1 pitch in between checking up on The Burning in Atlanta. We finished up around 4:45 (with not one frame of a killer blender) and got everything ready to hop in the car back to Nashville. The movie needed to be in the hands of the studio by 7:30. We got there around 7:12. Able to relax, we ventured to a restaurant called Cock of the Walk, a place that boasted on the outside they have the best fried catfish in the world. I haven’t had that much catfish in my life so I can’t say whether it’s the best, but it’s some darn good catfish alright (it's also got a giant chair.) We left for Huntsville around 9, arriving back at 11:15. Closing in on our exit, we started having a 90’s sing-along featuring The President of the United States of America, Chumbawamba, and Blues Travelers. Hadn’t heard some of those songs in a long, long time. We passed out almost immediately when we got to the house, as our flight took off at 6:45 AM to…(sigh)…Atlanta.

Now back in New York after a fun, exciting and adventurous weekend, it’s as if the scheduling Gods knew we would have trouble with the Braves after the break and gave us this perfect off-day to recollect ourselves. When I first got home, I tuned into SNY and saw the newest Mets Weekly. It was the one right after the break and had a lot of highlights of all the good times in the 1st half. Not a bad sight after such bad baseball. I still feel this team is different than all the other Mets teams that sputter in the 2nd half. No way am I ready to start panicking. Sound the Alarm? Yeah, sure. But I believe in Terry Collins’ ability to get these players in the right frame of mind to make a run. I don’t believe the starting pitching will be as bad as it has been. Though it might not be as good as it was. This team, however, as they showed in the 1st half and even at points this weekend, will battle. They just need to get on the good foot.

LET'S. GO. METS. 

(Bring Matt Harvey up. Let him finish this year’s development in the Big Leagues.)

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