Manufactured Sadness

I hear you millennials on the Internet talking about “Well these home runs are nice and all, but the Mets need to learn how to manufacture runs.” First off, what is Harold Reynolds feeding you people? Second, you see some of the lineups the Mets put out last season? The Mets couldn’t manufacture a run by eating an ecoli flavored burrito. Now we’re going to quibble over how they’re scored?

It’s valid to the point where you don’t want to be the Braves of 2014 where when they’re not hitting, they’re striking out a million times. And through their four runs, they struck out 17 times tonight, which is painful. (To be fair, three of those were by Bartolo Colon, who Jeremy Hellickson was so scared of he threw him breaking balls through the whole at bat.) But here’s the ironic part, if the Mets had one more of those evil home runs instead of manufacturing the first two runs … which would have come if Asdrubal Cabrera’s double off the fence was a few inches higher … then the Mets wouldn’t have needed to go to extra innings tonight and they would have avoided an 11 inning loss to the Phillies on Wednesday.

But regardless of that, teams that score four runs should win. No matter how the four runs get on the board. It isn’t going to happen every day, but when the Mets score four and have a 4-3 lead in the 7th inning in Philadelphia, they should win. But Addison Reed couldn’t prevent his inherited runner from scoring by retiring a .239 hitter, and the Mets went back to not being able to hit the Phillies bullpen. And then a weird 11th inning which saw a terrible wild pitch by Hansel Robles who for some reason pitched in Tuesday night’s 11-1 win, a ball 2 on an intentional walk to Emmanuel Burriss before the Mets realized that Hansel Robles was better against lefthanders so they stopped the walk and got Burriss to pop up, and a Peter Bourjos (he of the career .239 average reference earlier) infield hit down the line to David Wright to end it. A 5-4 loss on … a manufactured run. Very funny, Harold Reynolds.

Heartbreaker, but they took the series from the Phillies and looked a lot better than they did when the two teams battled by the chop shops. So much to like, yet it still leaves an empty feeling in me heading into the off day. That probably says more about me than about the team. Or maybe I had one of those ecoli burritos.

Today’s Hate List

1. Peter Bourjos
2. Emmanuel Burriss
3. Jeanmar Gomez
4. Curt Schilling
5. Johnny Johnathan