So what’s that five in a row now? I’m not in the mood to check, but I’m pretty certain this may be our longest losing streak of the season. The worst part of course is that three of those five games should have been in the win column including last night’s. Ugh… Last night…

With all due respect to my colleague’s “rah-rah, there’s plenty of season left” post this morning, I think I’ll take the dark-side approach to this recent debacle and get some angst off of my chest. I’ve never been one for rainbows and butterflies after a loss like that.

Jason Bay came back last night and the good news was that he looked like his old self, and that was the bad news too. He went 0-for-3 and he seemed to be spending most of his time in the dugout alone and not huddled with any of his other teammates. At least that’s what we saw whenever the camera panned into the dugout. It reminded me a lot of the final days of Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo. Perez sitting alone in the bullpen, while Castillo sat at the opposite end of the water cooler always alone and with his head down.

It looks like even Terry Collins is running out of patience with him too. An hour before the game he was singing Bay’s praises and what an impact his presence will mean to a lineup that is struggling to score runs. Yet when the ninth inning came around and the Mets were down to their last gasps of air, he didn’t let his $66 million dollar slugger go up to the plate. Collins had already seen enough and decided to pinch hit rookie Jordany Valdespin for his dead man walking. The move paid off and the kid with the so-called attitude problem launched a three-run shot to put the Mets up 3-2. Know your place, rook…

It was an electrifying moment, but it was very short-lived. You see, the Mets still needed three more outs to win the game, and when you looked beyond the outfield fence it was Bobby Parnell and Miguel Batista throwing in the bullpen. <sigh>

I’ve ranted enough about Bobby Parnell including a legendary blast just two days ago, so I’ll spare you my replenished supply of venom on that matter. If any of you are still clinging to this warped notion that Parnell is going to be a solid closer for us one day because of his great advanced metrics and because Fangraphs says so, I’m convinced that nothing I say will ever change your minds anyway. If seeing isn’t believing, and you can’t admit that Parnell is the last person you want pitching in the ninth inning, then I’ll just move onto something else.

We had a rare treat yesterday in Washington before the game. Mets GM Sandy Alderson came out once again to emphasize that the Mets are buyers, even though he has yet to buy anything. Strike up the band. Apparently he is waiting for a Macy’s One Day Sale or one of those legendary K-Mart Blue Light Specials. Until then, he’ll just go window shopping and not much else. “Prices are too high”, he explained yesterday.  Someone should tell him, so is the price of losing.

I look at the standings this morning and see that we’re now seven games behind the Nationals. Teams lick their chops whenever the Mets starting pitcher hands the ball to the bullpen now. It doesn’t matter if we’re playing the worst of the worst (Chicago Cubs) or the best of the best (New York Yankees), whenever they see Bobby Parnell, Jon Rauch, Ramon Ramirez or Tim Byrdak they don’t see a reliever, they see a pinata.

Pedro Beato certainly threw that wild pitch that ended the game, but lets not pretend that a real defensive-minded catcher wouldn’t have easily reached to his right and kept that ball in front of him. There’s another one of those plays that won’t ever show up in the error column…

I don’t know what to say anymore… Usually I like to follow-up my complaints with some sort of a solution to the problem, but my cupboard is bare this morning. How many times can I say this bullpen stinks and is one of the worst I’ve seen in a long, long time? It isn’t like in 2007 and 2008 where it fell apart in the second half and got worse from there. This year’s model has sucked wire to wire even going back to Spring Training. The ship feels like it’s sinking and Alderson standing on the deck proclaiming that we are buyers seems odd to me and out of place. The next time I see him I’ll expect him to say something like, “women and children first”.