Step Right Up and Beat the Mets...

There is perhaps nothing in the world I enjoy more than watching the Mets suffer. Live with the world's most annoying fanbase with the biggest Yankee-inferiority complex imaginable for a little while as anything other than a member of it and you'll understand why. But I think it's especially sweet for me, as a Phillies fan after living through 8 years of Phillie Phailures, and having predominantly Mets fans as friends to boot. So watching this team continue to stumble and fumble and bumble and invent ways to lose like they're still caught in that 4-game sweep at CBP last August/September over the first 60+ games of the season has been, truly, as entertaining for me as watching the Phils play some of the best baseball in the Majors. But what's transpired over the last week of Mets baseball...not even I would wish this on anyone.

This is truly beneath the dignity of a Major League Baseball team. The New York Mets have now blown a lead of 3 runs or greater in the 8th inning or later of FIVE consecutive games. They've lost six of their last seven games. They have genuinely perfected the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And the truly amusing part of it is, this has been easily their best stretch of starting pitching of the season. As Gary Cohen is explaining on SNY's postgame as I type this, for the first two months of the season, the Mets' bullpen was the team's unquestioned strength and the only reliable facet of an otherwise underachieving team filled with declining offensive stars and a suicidal mixture of inexperienced and unreliable younger starting pitchers and injury prone, aging veterans. While it was lauded at the time as the move which made the Mets favorites in the East again, the deal didn't come without its own monumental risks, namely in that it left the team even more bereft of Major League-ready depth in the minors than it already was. While I won't pretend that Santana's astronomical contract will make any player unaffordable to the deep-pocketed Mets, the opportunity to significantly improve a ballclub midseason by primarily financial means is almost non-existent, and there is simply nothing for the Mets to even offer another team, were they even willing to further compromise the future in hopes of salvaging a season which shows very few signs of turning around. I won't tempt karma, or the becarefulwhatyouwishfor Gods, as I like to call them, by saying I hope the Mets turn it around, but it will be slightly bittersweet if the Phillies continue to play the upper echelon ball they've made it their business to play this season, and the Mets can't hold up their end of what was supposed to be the breakout season in baseball's next great rivalry.

That all having been said, there is one aspect of this implosion which has been completely guilt and sympathy free for me: chatty cathy himself, Billy the Child Wagner, he of the "I didn't blow a save tonight, go ask my teammates why we can't win" rant just a few weeks back, has blown saves in his last three appearances. To put that in perspective, Little William was perceived as somewhat unreliable during his times with the Phillies during 2004 and 2005, blowing 7 saves in 66 opportunities. The last time he blew three consecutive saves? 2000, as a member of the Houston Astros. He's now blown 5 saves in each of his three years as a Met, and of course, he has to keep closing until October...well, let's be honest with ourselves, for this team...probably September. I think the horse himself just put it best to the assembled New York media on SNY..."I can't say a thing about our team. I suck." Billy, you said it man. Now if only you knew it was time to shut up. If I feel like it, there'll be a post coming a little later with pictures, a setlist, and some impressions from the Spill Canvas show I attended last night.

Until next time, you can derelick my balls, Mugatu.