After last night’s frustrating 1-0 loss to the Chicago Cubs in which the team squandered another excellent pitching performance, this time by Jon Niese, manager Terry Collins lost his cool when asked about losing his fourth straight game to the Cubs this season.
“I don’t give a shit if it’s the Cubs or it’s the New York City College,” Collins said, his face reddening with anger. “We’ve just gotta win tomorrow. We can keep pitching great but we’ve gotta get some offense.”
The Mets have dropped seven straight decisions to the Cubs dating to August 17, 2014 and has lost 10 of its last 12 games to the Cubs.
It’s somewhat ironic that the Mets happen to be playing the one team that could probably give them the offensve player they are starving for in return for the young starting pitcher that Chicago is looking for. So far it’s been offense five, pitching zero.
The Mets seem bent on waiting out the return of injured players to fix this offense. Sandy Alderson says he’s scouring the market for external options and asserts he’s willing to overpay, but then in the same breath says there’s nobody to overpay for.
As for internal options you have outfielder Michael Conforto who the team is unwilling to promote at this time due to readiness concerns, and reportedly you have shortstop Matt Reynolds who continues to hang around in Las Vegas and says he’s been frustrated watching everyone around him make there MLB debuts except for him.
Outside of those three options is really not much Terry Collins can do except to wait it out and hope that somehow a few of his players will step up and emerge as legitimate offensive contributors.
In the meantime the Mets continue to squander one sterling pitching performance after another with little to show for them in the win column.
Last night it was Jon Niese who was victimized by the lack of offense, and in fact he’s pitched solidly over his last three starts and the yet the Mets are 0-3 in those games.
Mets pitching has allowed five runs in its last 51.0 innings pitched for a 0.88 ERA while the team has batted .188 over the last six games.
This is nothing new. It’s been this season’s primary storyline. In fact, if the offense continues in this futility, at the end of the season they could use as their epitaph; “They had the elite pitching, the brand new $5 million dollar scoreboard, and the best summer concerts, but alas they had no bats in their arsenal.”
