With the news that Mike Pelfrey has been pitching for pretty much the entire spring with a high ankle sprain coming out in the past week, it put his horrific spring in some semblance of perspective. Now we’re talking about perspective that’s somewhat skewered when it comes to a man who has lost pretty much all benefit of the doubt, mind you. But perspective does exist if you can believe that. And that made Saturday’s test against the Cardinals a big one for Pelfrey … or as big as it gets in the spring.
For the first two innings while Pelfrey was mowing down Cardinals left and right, I was preparing a mea culpa of sorts for Pelfrey. Maybe all he needed this year was to be fully healthy. I can appreciate that. And I was ready to pour my gallon of haterade down the kitchen drain on this one. Then came the third inning. And Pelfrey was up to his old tricks giving up four runs in what turned out to be a 6-6 tie.
“I was actually pretty pleased with today. The ball obviously came out even better than it did last time. I threw a lot of strikes. I know I made a couple pitches that I left up and didn’t execute and they hit it. But I thought I was aggressive throwing strikes and I thought the ball came out of my hand pretty good.” -Mike Pelfrey
Well, why wouldn’t Mike Pelfrey be pleased? It isn’t like he gave up 8 runs to the Astros in less than three innings. He wasn’t horrific Pelfrey, he was just normally bad Pelfrey … a marked improvement. Maybe throwing his hands over his head on the windup did the trick for him. Too bad all of his problems seem to come when he’s pitching from the stretch. Can we have Mike do a cartwheel out of the stretch before he throws the ball? Or maybe as he comes out of the stretch and before he throws the ball, he can Tebow. Please. Anything.
I wanted Pelfrey gone this season. That obviously isn’t happening. I’m still all for losing him if you can get a better pitcher in. (Could Roy Oswalt be that desperate? Probably not.) But if you’re looking to bring in a middling veteran for Pelfrey, say for example a Joel Pineiro (who is a free agent), or a Kevin Millwood or Jason Marquis (who are both employed but just used here as examples), then why bother? We don’t look at Pelfrey in this way because he’s still a first round pick with his original organization, but Pelfrey has become that middling veteran who is officially nothing special. At this point the Mets, no matter how bad Pelfrey is the rest of the spring, are better served to just eat the dinner they made for themselves rather than dump it and head out to the local greasy spoon, which is all that is around a fifty mile radius … seemingly.
The 6-6 tie wasn’t without its bright moments though, as Ike Davis hit an opposite field three run jack after a Cardinals error which should have ended the inning, and Lucas Duda hit one to the damn moon. But Frank Francisco gave up another ninth inning lead which caused this game to end in a tie. If Francisco keeps this up then he’ll have no trade value for when the Reds need to replace Ryan Madson with a more experienced closer in July.
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