Friday, August 18, 2006
The Sky is Falling
Maybe it's not completely my fault. I've been conditioned to think this way. I've watched the Mets incomprehensibly blow the wild card in 1999, seen 75 different sets of closers fail against the Braves and Yankees, and have seen the Jets lose in so many creative and surreally painful ways (1986 AFC Divisional, the Marino fake spike, the missed FGs against the Steelers) I've started to block them out.
It's just this simple -- the Mets are due for a postseason collapse. Considering that Budds is a Royals fan, all these complaints are admittedly small and relatively insignificant. But this team is doomed. I can't believe they're going to win the NL by 10 games (and the NL East by 15) and still not make the World Series. It's painful.
The offense is fine. Delgado is having a subpar season and he's still going to end up with 35 homers and 110 RBIs, and Reyes, Wright, Beltran and Captain Red Ass have had superb years.
But the pitching is a problem, and very few teams have offenses good enough to make up for a weak pitching staff. Losing Duaner Sanchez was a huge blow. With he, Heilman and Wagner, the Mets only needed their starters to go six innings and they could lock up a game. Losing Sanchez means the Mets need more from their starters, but the starters don't have more to give.
Glavine, by all accounts, has had a great year. He started great and, after a midseason swoon, seems back on track. But he's a six-inning, two- or three-runs per game pitcher. And he's the best the Mets have. Obviously Pedro is the big piece of this puzzle. If he doesn't get healthy and build up his arm strength for the postseason, the Mets are sunk. He's the only pitcher on the staff that other teams fear. They respect Glavine but he rarely just shuts the opposition down for eight innings. Pedro can.
Trachsel is basically a five-inning pitcher nowadays, and if he does work into the seventh you're looking at a four-hour game (and no one wants that). Duque has been solid for the most part -- had a good run of seven-inning, three-runs-allowed games there -- but just gets lit up once every few starts. Like 11 runs allowed in four innings kind of lit up. This scares me. John Maine has indisputably been the team's best starter for the past month, but will other teams catch on to him (as happens to a lot of young pitchers)? If not, do you dump Trachsel or Hernandez and start Maine in Game 3 (assuming Pedro can go in Game 1)?
It's a lot of ifs and question marks, all in all. The good news is that the NL is relatively weak, so it's not out of the question for the Mets to make the World Series. And once you're there, you just need a couple of guys to get hot for five or six games, or two pitchers to be lights out. It could happen. I just think I'm more of a wishful thinker than a believer.
It's just this simple -- the Mets are due for a postseason collapse. Considering that Budds is a Royals fan, all these complaints are admittedly small and relatively insignificant. But this team is doomed. I can't believe they're going to win the NL by 10 games (and the NL East by 15) and still not make the World Series. It's painful.
The offense is fine. Delgado is having a subpar season and he's still going to end up with 35 homers and 110 RBIs, and Reyes, Wright, Beltran and Captain Red Ass have had superb years.
But the pitching is a problem, and very few teams have offenses good enough to make up for a weak pitching staff. Losing Duaner Sanchez was a huge blow. With he, Heilman and Wagner, the Mets only needed their starters to go six innings and they could lock up a game. Losing Sanchez means the Mets need more from their starters, but the starters don't have more to give.
Glavine, by all accounts, has had a great year. He started great and, after a midseason swoon, seems back on track. But he's a six-inning, two- or three-runs per game pitcher. And he's the best the Mets have. Obviously Pedro is the big piece of this puzzle. If he doesn't get healthy and build up his arm strength for the postseason, the Mets are sunk. He's the only pitcher on the staff that other teams fear. They respect Glavine but he rarely just shuts the opposition down for eight innings. Pedro can.
Trachsel is basically a five-inning pitcher nowadays, and if he does work into the seventh you're looking at a four-hour game (and no one wants that). Duque has been solid for the most part -- had a good run of seven-inning, three-runs-allowed games there -- but just gets lit up once every few starts. Like 11 runs allowed in four innings kind of lit up. This scares me. John Maine has indisputably been the team's best starter for the past month, but will other teams catch on to him (as happens to a lot of young pitchers)? If not, do you dump Trachsel or Hernandez and start Maine in Game 3 (assuming Pedro can go in Game 1)?
It's a lot of ifs and question marks, all in all. The good news is that the NL is relatively weak, so it's not out of the question for the Mets to make the World Series. And once you're there, you just need a couple of guys to get hot for five or six games, or two pitchers to be lights out. It could happen. I just think I'm more of a wishful thinker than a believer.
# posted by EJ @ 2:46 PM 
