Augusts and Septembers of long seasons are for evaluating who should come back and who should be jettisoned to the wolves next season. I generally like to see more people go than most. So perhaps I’m not the best person to ask about that right now.
But as far as I’m concerned, Robert Gsellman is wolf vittles, 2018 edition. He’ll go down in Mets lore as somebody who helped save the season in 2016. They don’t make the playoffs without his contributions. But he has been exposed in 2017, and if he’s taking a regular turn in 2018, the Mets are in trouble. He gave up nine hits and two walks in four innings on Saturday, and though only two of his runs were earned, the error that saved him was by him. A dropped toss on a cover play eventually allowed four unearned to score in the first inning, one of them on a wild pitch. It put the Mets in a bad way for the rest of the game, which has been a recurring theme for the Mets this season. First inning holes making for eight innings of baseball that seem like torture. If the Mets are really interested in upgrading the team, they can upgrade Gsellman’s spot right away as far as I’m concerned.
The Mets tried to crawl back largely thanks to Wilmer Flores (who I’m going to get into a large amount of arguments about this winter, I can tell. Flores went four-for-four with three RBI and a home run to keep the Mets in the game, and his two run double closed the gap to 6-4 in the eighth. But then Jeurys Familia made his return from the disabled list and threw flat slider after flat slider and got hammered for three runs which put the game out of reach as the Mets dropped Saturday’s game to the Nationals 9-4. That’s probably why he wasn’t inserted in for a struggling A.J. Ramos on Friday. And that might be why he doesn’t regain his closer’s job for a while. He seems to be pitching like somebody who has had a shoulder injury and his holding back a little bit.
Speaking of shoulder injuries, Michael Conforto might be out for an entire year.
The Mets are not commenting on Conforto’s situation — general manager Sandy Alderson, through a club spokesman, declined to address the matter before his team beat the Nationals 4-2 on Friday — but an orthopedist with knowledge of such injuries said Conforto could face a rehab of six to 12 months if surgery is chosen.
“If he has the surgery, by a year from now, he should be good to continue his career,” Dr. Umer Dasti, a sports medicine specialist at the Ridgewood Orthopedic Group in New Jersey, said.
Well that’s comforting. For all of the meaningless games that are coming up for the rest of this season, we’re now looking at the possibility of a lot more next season as well. That is, unless the Mets decide to be aggressive this off-season and sign some players to some deals that see these players become well compensated in exchange for playing good baseball.
As for the rest of 2017, may God bless the people who get paid to write about this team. And may He have mercy on those who, for some reason, decide to do this for free.
Today’s Hate List
- Double G
- El Lindo
- Donnie
- Ant
- Ollie
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