NEW YORK, NY – If you’re a New York Mets fan that doesn’t do well with difficult conversations, this might be a good time to click on over to something a bit lighter, like a Garfield comic strip or a Rudy Giuliani press conference. For the rest of you, let’s get right into that mess out in Queens and finish up with a quick word about hockey.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, so let’s just dive right in: The New York Mets have been playing like a$$ for almost a month now. After coming off a pretty great West Coast roadtrip in mid-April, where the took 7 of 10 from the A’s, Dodgers, and Giants, they have come crashing down to Earth in horrific fashion. As I sit here writing this on a nice sunny afternoon in NYC, the Mets are coming off losing 5 straight series to some of MLB’s worst teams (Detroit, Colorado, Cincy) before ending their worst-in-over-a-decade series-losing schneid by completing a stellar four-game split with the dreadful Washington Nationals—getting hammered 10-3 in their final game on Monday. Spoiler Alert: They lost last night and Verlander got smacked around.
To say the Mets are a mess, is a massive understatement. They are stinking out the joint in pretty much every phase of the game, and it’s getting difficult to see how they’re going to get things turned around. I’m not going to start getting bogged down in abysmal individual statistics and performances, let’s just look at some of the big stuff. The Mets are currently sitting at 20-22, 6.5 games out of first in the NL East. That doesn’t seem too bad until you realize that they are only 1.5 games out of last place, where the aforementioned Nats and other CHUDS currently reside. Did I mention the Mets’ payroll is over $350 million?
Well let’s look on the bright side, they’re back home. Who are they hosting? Oh, YAY, it’s Tampa Bay, the team with the best record in all of baseball. Hey, here’s a fun fact I read the other day. Did you know that the Mets are paying Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander a combined $86 million this year and the entire Rays pitching staff—all 20 of them—are making only $22 million? (The figures could be off, but I’m taking the Blaber approach to fact-checking on this one, which is to say, I’m not.) That’s pretty Amazin‘, and I don’t mean for the Mets. So far it appears that having two geezers anchoring the top of your rotation while earning almost a quarter of your entire payroll may not be a winning business model.
But it’s not just those guys and the pitching staff. The offense has been abysmal as well. I’ve talked plenty about Lindor, so why beat a dead horse? It’s not just him. The entire offense looks lobotomized. There are flickers of life here and there, but most of the time it’s “the lights are on but nobody is home.” When the pitching goes south, which it has a LOT lately, there’s no fight coming from the other side. I’m actually curious to see what they look like starting tonight (Tuesday) with Tampa Bay. Hoping against hope there’s some pride left in the tank.
NHL Playoffs. Congratulations to the National Hockey League on a thrilling post-season, where any team I could remotely care about has been eliminated. Instead we’re left with hockey teams in Carolina, Florida, Dallas, and Vegas. This is just depressing. It’s enough to make me watch a Mets game.
Come back tomorrow for Buddy Diaz, who is trusting the MTM process. Big mistake.
