Painful Season Finally Ends

This weekend turned out about how I figured it would. When the Mets lost the 10 inning game to the Cubs I knew the season was over, it was just a matter of when and how.

Friday, Mike Pelfrey did his best against a team that has owned him this season, but once again the Mets offense went to sleep. As much as the bull-pen is to blame for all the losses they caused this year, the offense was delinquent in their duties too. How many times have we all seen runners stranded in scoring position? How many times have the Mets not scored a run after the 5th inning? How many times have the Mets hitters made lousy pitchers look like Cy Young winners? When will the hitters learn to hit breaking pitches? All too often this season the Mets never seemed to have the killer instinct to finish teams off. They never made it a habit to bury teams early and often. They would get out to an early lead, and then coast. The other teams would chip away, and before you knew it, it was a 1 run game and the bull-pen suffered for it.

Saturday, Johan showed once again why he's the best pitcher in baseball bar none. To come back on 3 days rest and throw a 3 hit shut-out when the team needed the win is the stuff Aces are made for. While watching the game, I thought back to the last Saturday of 2007 and it was Deja Vue all over. John Maine, with his team in the same situation, struck out 14 and took a no-hitter into the 9th inning. Unlike Johan, John had 10 runs to work with. If not for Santana's super human effort, the Mets would have ended their season on Saturday not Sunday. The Mets once again failed to score any runs to allow you to relax while watching. The bull-pen gets plenty of blame for the season's failures, but if the Mets had just scored a few more runs in a few more games, October baseball would have been guaranteed weeks ago.

Sunday, Oliver Perez at least pitched well enough to give the Mets a chance. On short rest he went 5+ innings and only gave up 2 runs. Smith shut down the Fish in the 6th, Stokes pitched the 7th and was rescued by another patented Chavez catch in left-field. You could almost see the eerie similarities to game 7 in the 2006 NLCS. The team was charged up, and Chavez was leading off the bottom of the inning. Then just like in '06, the air left the stadium in an instant. Instead of Heilman sucking the life out of Shea, it was a left hander. In the top of the 8th, Scott Schoeneweis did what he does almost as well as Heilman. He served up the winning HR and got booed as he dragged his butt of the field. Ayala then comes in and serves up HR #2 in the inning. By that time it didn't matter. The Mets were dead men walking and they went out with a whimper in the 9th. The game lost in the 10th inning to the Cubs earlier in the week killed them. That loss took out their heart and threw it to the ground. Just like an deer that's been shot thru the heart, it just took a little while to realize they were dead.

I said back in August when Billy Wagner got hurt that the Mets were going to have a hard time making it to October without him. Stokes, Smith, Ayala, and Figueroa did their best, but in the end it wasn't enough. Too often Heilman, Schoeneweis, Feliciano and Sanchez shot the team in the chest and in the end The Mets could overcome all the obstacles. Let's hope that Omar doesn't burden the fans with another version of the "07 or "08 team. Drastic changes need to be made and had better be made before spring training begins.