Present and Future Mirages

It’s hard to gauge games like Thursday afternoon’s debacle. When you combine getaway day with blazing heat you get two teams that swing at a lot of pitches and hope to get out of town and to an air conditioned bus quickly. The Albert Pujols at-bat in the first was probably the last fascinating at-bat of the game, where Jon Niese took a cue from the previous two games and pitched him outside. Pujols then whacked a long drive foul to right. Then Niese adjusts and goes inside. Pujols adjusts back and raps one foul down the other side.

Now what?

Unfortunately, the plan was to give Pujols a pitch to crush off the second deck, which is exactly what Niese was forced into by Pujols. And since then, it looked like everyone on both teams were in air conditioning mode (time of game: 2:07) and the Cardinals took the final game of the series, 6-2. That’s everyone … except for Angel Pagan. I don’t know what mode he was in when he threw the ball behind a runner at first in the fifth, only to find out that it was so hot that Pagan threw the ball to a mirage of Carlos Delgado. Sure, Lucas Duda should have been there, but who asked Pagan to throw the ball?

Oh right, the Delgado mirage asked him to throw the ball.

Delgado is already a mirage … Carlos Beltran will probably be soon, as he got an ovation in the ninth inning for what was likely his last at-bat as a Met at Citi Field. It wasn’t a large ovation, as it was an afternoon kids crowd, and most people were too hot to stand and applaud. Heck, this was the kind of crowd where I got off the train stop coming in and it took about a full minute to spot somebody wearing a Mets jersey. But the people who understood what was going on gave Beltran his ovation after he flied out against Mitchell Boggs. Tthis is where this blogger came up with the great idea to draw the parallel between this final at-bat and what Beltran did against Boggs the night Boggs gave up 10 runs against the Mets in six innings … but Beltran didn’t even play that game. Joke’s on me. But hey, Damion Easley had two hits.)

Certainly not the kind of send off we all expected the day Beltran strode up to the podium and proclaimed this to be the “New Mets”. But it was something of a send off, I guess.