Let The Hits Keep Comin’

The Mets are in a bind.

Max Scherzer is gone for ten games. Justin Verlander is still out for … probably about ten more games. Jose Quintana will be out until we forget he’s on the team. Carlos Carrasco is now on the IL. And the league is adjusting to Kodai Senga. Consider that on Friday night, Senga got five swings and misses on the ghost fork, with only one coming on strike three. Granted, he didn’t throw a lot of forks, but it’s a long cry from when he struck out eight Marlins on the ghost fork alone.

But the Giants were on to him. Senga pitched four scoreless innings and had a 5-0 lead after Pete Alonso and Eduardo Escobar jacked two-run dingers for him in the 4th, along with a double by Brandon Nimmo who I think has morphed into Tony Gwynn for the time being. But Senga was a little different than we’ve known him so far. Mixing his pitches a little differently, trying to stay ahead of the Giants as they were trying to lay off the ghost fork. But it wasn’t working in the 5th inning, as he gave up two runs on solo homers, a single, and a wild pitch. The good news was that he was able to hang on for the five required innings to get the W. The bad news is that it was only five innings he pitched as the Mets are struggling to ease the number of innings the bullpen has to log because the starters are disappearing, and they can’t go much more than five.

So it’s apparent that the Mets are going to have to hit the broadsides of some very big barns to get them through this stretch where four of their five projected starters in spring training are gone, and their bullpen is craving the long man stylings of Tommy Hunter. At least for tonight, they did just that. And they did it in the style that made them so lovable in 2022. Responding to the opposition scoring with runs of their own in the very next inning, and scoring in the late innings. After the Giants cut it to 5-4 off Senga, Jeff McNeil hit his first dinger of the year to make it 6-4, and then they got three runs in the 7th thanks to a two-run single by Alonso, and an RBI single by McNeil to make it 9-4, which is how it would end.

Everybody has to contribute, but the three studs in the middle of the order: Alonso, McNeil, and Lindor have to be the straws that stir the drink. Alonso and Lindor have been doing it all road trip, and McNeil has been doing it since Los Angeles. They all did it tonight, and when you add in Nimmo at the top of the order, and you have a future recipe for success … or at least a recipe where one ingredient saves the dish. That ingredient for the Mets for the rest of the month has to be the lineup, or else the dish falls flat. The dish already has the distinct odor of Phil Cuzzi … the type of odor that goes straight to your nose via your brain stem.

***

So it looks like Max Scherzer may have been bluffing after all, as he got the 10-game suspension for using a domestic substance, and he’s not going to appeal.

Max Scherzer says he is not appealing his suspension because the appeal would have been through an MLB arbiter and not a neutral arbiter pic.twitter.com/MilwDf9Ebi

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) April 21, 2023

This disappoints me greatly. I mean, I get it. The Mets want this over with so that they can be whole again sooner rather than later. But I wanted chaos, because to me, Scherzer was clearly railroaded, and would have been railroaded again by MLB’s “impartial arbiter”. It was going to be a kangaroo court, and Scherzer knew it. There was no way the MLBPA’s negotiator was going to win this case if Rob Manfred could help it. So forward we move. Max can benefit from further rest. We’ll all benefit from a starting rotation of Senga, Tylor Megill, David Peterson, Joey Meatballs, and one of the scores of pitchers that Brodie Van Waganen stocked the farm system with before he ended his very successful tenure as Mets GM.

(And by “very successful”, I clearly mean “punted an entire draft to get a guy that had 57 shoulder surgeries before the age of 22.”)

Today’s Hate List

1. Phil Cuzzi
2. Rob Manfred
3. The MLB Arbiter, coincidentally named “Mob Ranfred”
4. Damon Severson
5. Also, Trea Turner