Turned Off

I had great seats at Thursday’s game, and I attended with great people. The seats will not always be that great, and I may not have people to go with all the time. What this means, I fear, is that the best part of attending a Met game for me in 2014, on a consistent basis, is the 20 second clip of Turn It On Again by Genesis that they play during the opening montage.

No, really. Turn it on, turn it up, and rip the knob off, because this is it, kids. It gets turned off in the first inning. I thought this team would be offensively challenged, with their starting pitching being good enough to lose 3-2. But this bullpen, which I thought may be bad, is an absolute hellscape. Sending the Mets bullpen at the Washington Nationals lineup is like trying to cut a tomato into eight even parts with a straw. The wonderful story of perseverance provided by Scott Rice has entered a dark chapter as after his one-third of an inning of work today, his ERA is now 54. Jeurys Familia, like Rice, gave up two runs but was spared a Rice like jump as one of his runs was earned. But the two of them combined with their four runs given up in the seventh inning turned a manageable 3-2 deficit into a Red Wedding. And Carlos Torres came in and walked two batters and gave up a run in his inning of work which completed this latest failure pile in the bowl of sadness known as Citi Field.

Apologies to Patton Oswalt for that last line.

Yup, the guy in the picture isn’t just your banker … he’s the Mets new setup guy.

And wouldn’t you know it, and it was all too predictable, the Mets caught a break when Jordan Zimmermann was scratched in favor of Tanner Roark on the hill for Washington. Roark’s small sample size was pretty good but he was no Jordan Zimmermann. Of course, Roark settled down after giving up his only two runs in the game in the first inning (helped by Denard Span losing a fly ball in the sun so let’s not get all proud of ourselves there, lineup). You knew the Mets weren’t going to hit Tanner Roark, right? If you didn’t, have you not been watching this team the last 25 years?

The worst part about being at this game is that this team has become the very embodiment of paint drying. They waltz up, they strike out, they waltz back to the bench. It’s a slow pitch softball team playing against a major league baseball team. Watching them is like sitting in your favorite chair and having your butler pop in a cassette tape like in the Maxell commercial from way back when. But instead of Flight of the Valkyries, the tape is playing some new age meditation kill me music and you want to shove unicorn horns in your ears until your gray matter oozes from your eyeballs. That’s been watching your 2014 Mets so far.

But Tim Teufel gave bubble gum to fans before every inning. So there’s your ray of sunshine.

Your news of the day came after the game when Terry Collins said that Lucas Duda is going to play first base for the foreseeable future. Great. I feel much better now. Hey, put that chair a little to the left, and switch those other two in the back. Yes. That’s perfect. Hey, is that an iceberg?