I am as optimistic as anyone wants to be when you think that the Mets can turn this ship around, put together a run that can make this team worth watching again. When you go through years of not much promise, you just hope that maybe, just maybe this year could be different. I thought that in the first two weeks of the season when we had a good start and then just as fast as we started, the team started to spiral out of control. Injury to Travis d’Arnaud pushed plans to the side of having him man the backstop, Jon Niese going quickly from Ace to struggling to get a win and a bullpen that has had a hard time getting anyone out and actually even holding a lead. Not to mention the many struggles that Ike Davis has had this season which has Mets fans wondering if he will ever recapture his stroke.
We wonder nowadays if the team will ever score more than 5 runs a game, which they have not done in the last 15 games or who will be in the lineup for each game and will those players actually produce. Rick Ankiel must have read my last post, “Will Ankiel Answer the Mets Need for Their Powerless Outfield?” Since joining the team, he is hitting .304, 2 HR in 7 games, but the verdict is still out on this move and it will take sometime to see if the move was worth the money spent. Without including Ankiel’s numbers the Mets five outfielders combined are hitting .224, 16 HRs, 50 RBIs, which I am sure that Ankiel can top that alone if he continues to get comfortable at the plate.
The team may not have the talent us fans have been accustomed to watching and as the players are aware, Mets fans are very passionate about their team, which Terry Collins recently eluded to when he went after the fans in the media.
He chose to take out his frustration on the fans recently by saying, “They (fans) have no idea what goes on in there. They have absolutely no idea what it means to be a professional teammate at this level.” That may be true to some extent, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t see the writing on the wall. It doesn’t mean that we are not educated baseball fans, plus we feel we understand the game better than most that actually play the game. We may be fooling ourselves, but we just want what other successful teams and organizations have, and that is a chance. A chance to watch our team go out each day and play the game the way it is supposed to be played.
I hope other fans feel the same way I do, but I can do without all the drama. If you have a good player on the team, play him and if you don’t care to then don’t, but make a right decision and leave it out of the news. Give the fans hope that maybe just maybe this team, our team will turn it around. This is baseball, a game we all grew up loving and some playing and we just hope that ownership gets the concept that in order to keep the fans happy, you have to put together a team worth rooting for. They won’t win all the games but have something to build on.
In a recent NY Daily News article, Collins actually said he regret his remarks about the fans, “Of course I regret the choice of words. I certainly respect the New York fans; they’re the most knowledgeable fans I’ve ever been around.” See Collins even admits how smart we are and he goes on to say “They know the game. They know the people.”
We know what we expect and we know that unless there is some sort of hope, this ship will continue to sink and when it finally goes down, usually the captain goes down with it and I am not referring to David Wright.
[iframe]<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/CD-E-LDc384″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>[/iframe]
