Pelfrazzled

It shouldn’t come to the fact that every couple of weeks or so the Mets blogosphere becomes a Mike Pelfrey psychotherapy session. It isn’t fair, but Mike brings it on himself with his unique idiosyncrasies. It isn’t It doesn’t really matter what is going on in Pelfrey’s head. He could have oompa loompas singing constantly at him during ballgames and it really doesn’t matter.

What do you get, when your sinker is flat?
Lots of big hits off of Andy Dirks’ bat.
Where will you go, throwing nothing but slop?
Where will this madness ev … er … stop?
Maybe it’s in Buffalo.

The key is how Pelfrey lets whatever is in his head … if anything … affect him on the mound. Here’s what I mean:

First inning on Thursday, Miguel Cabrera at the plate with two outs and a runner on second. Okay, so you pitch Cabrera carefully and take your chances with Victor Martinez. Fine. Pelfrey pitches him carefully but well enough to have a chance to get him out with a 3-2 count. Pelfrey makes a good pitch that’s just a hair off the plate and Cabrera takes it for a walk. All right, you don’t get out of the inning but you’ve avoided throwing a meatball to Miguel so that’s good. I’m looking at Pelfrey after that pitch and he’s looking up to the sky in despair. Fair or not, Pelfrey gets extra scrutiny when you see him do stuff like that because you figure natural progression will have him chewing on his jersey and licking random body parts in the next five minutes. Sure enough Pelfrey subsequently walks Martinez to load the bases, and his day would have been a lot shorter if Andy Dirks hadn’t bailed him out by popping up the first pitch.

Then the third inning came, and I don’t know if I can qualify this as Mike Pelfrey psychoanalysis, but it’s no less frustrating an aspect of watching Pelfrey pitch: Two outs, runners on first and second after a sac fly made it 2-1, and Ramon Santiago is at the plate. Santiago, I’ll point out, is hitting .207 and is probably only in the lineup because Justin Verlander’s pitching. So Pelfrey gets ahead of him 0-2, and despite the general habit of pitchers to get cute and waste pitches on 0-2, this situation called for Pelfrey to stop f-ing around and blow this guy out fo the water. Instead, Pelfrey gets cute, nibbles, and loses his control all at the same time … and keeps Santiago in the at-bat long enough for him to see a cantaloupe sized pitch to line into center field to give the Tigers a 3-1 lead before Angel Pagan’s throwing error on that play made it 4-1, and that was basically game, set, and match right there. It should be noted there that Pelfrey backed up the wrong base saddling Pagan with the throwing error, so maybe this was more Mike Pelfrey psychoanalysis.

Boy it’s frustrating to see Pelfrey pitch like an ace at home only to go on the road for two starts and be as terrible as he was. Let’s remember it doesn’t matter in the short run. I certainly get that this series played out as well as we could have probably expected withVerlander being as close to an automatic loss as you can get (and the lineup did as well as they could have done against him). But Pelfrey is going to be counted on to come up with a big time start on the road at some point, whether it’s against the Giants next week (and by my calculations he’s going to face Matt Cain on the last game of the Giants series) or later in the season if the Mets are still in this thing. And if Pelfrey doesn’t either mentally toughen up or come up with a magic out pitch, he’s not going to do it.