The Mets held a team meeting before last night’s game only to see his team suffer a devastating loss after one of their worst offensive and defensive displays of the season. They’ve now lost five straight and find themselves six games under .500 and two games away from the NL East cellar.
The Mets squandered an initial three run lead, left 12 runners on base, went 3-for-18 with runners in scoring position. and committed several key errors including a costly miscue by David Wright that extended the sixth inning and allowed two Giants runs to score.
“Just a stupid play by me,” Wright said, looking frustrated. “I fielded the ball, was going to go to first, and then changed my mind at the last second and tried to throw it to second. Just dumb. Just flat-out dumb. … It’s easy to point fingers at some of the things that happened later in the game, but we had a play to get out of an inning and cut off their momentum and I made bonehead play and feel poorly about that.”
The Giants eventually won the game in the bottom of the ninth inning when Angel Pagan struck out to begin the inning, but reached safely when the pitch in the dirt was misplayed by Anthony Recker and his throw to first was late. Hunter Pence scored Pagan with a game-tying double. He then advanced to third on a fly out and after an intentional walk, Michael Morse won it with an RBI single.
“You can’t give good teams more than three outs,” Terry Collins said after the game. “If you do, you’re going to get burned by it. We didn’t make a couple of plays tonight that we have to make to give us a chance to win.”
Collins told his team before the game, “We’re still in striking range, the world is not coming to an end just yet so we have to keep our heads up and realize, hey let’s go win four or five in a row. ”
“Put a smile on when you walk through the door, what a great life we lead.’’
Travis d’Arnaud wasn’t smiling as he walked out the clubhouse door, learning that he had been demoted.
As Kevin Kernan of the NY Post pointed out this morning, the Mets have many problems at the plate and Travis d’Arnaud is just one of them. From a rookie, you only can expect so much, and because the more veteran bats haven’t produced, d’Arnaud’s shortcomings became magnified.
“He’s a rookie,’’ one Mets official said of d’Arnaud, “the other guys have to step up.’’
The Mets are 28th in the majors extra-base hits and 28th in total bases. They have had 40 quality starts, the second most in the majors, and for all that starting pitching, they own a 28-34 record.
Wright is angry. He’s frustrated. When he heard on Friday that Collins planned to rest him on Sunday, the Mets captain confronted his manager and said no way are you taking me out of this lineup right now. However, he was overruled.
“I’m not sure if it’s a day off or more,” said Wright. “It’s probably a benching at this point.”
It appears to me that Collins is quickly beginning to lose control of his clubhouse. There is a lot of dissension in the ranks and the team is starting to look very lifeless at times.
