Mets vs. Phillies

I had these thoughts the first time this happened, but then they swept Atlanta and things seemed to be looking up. Now however, that they have twice, twice goddammit, faced the Phillies, the team which, all year, they have had the most emotional incentive to beat, with a chance to pretty much eliminate them from post-season contention, and they haven’t even beaten them one time out of seven. It is things like this, that lead you to severely question weather or not the team has the ‘will to win,’ the ‘mental toughness,’ ‘bullpen,’ or whatever else it takes to make a serious post season run. Looking at Mets.com this morning and seeing Brian Lawrence listed as the starter, leads you to wonder if they’ll even make the playoffs.

I actually attended the fiasco that was the end of the season series with Philly. Looking over the box score, there is an impressive symmetry of numbers: for every strikeout that Perez got, he gave up a walk; for every run that the Mets scored, they committed an error. Their level of play was basically miserable, but they still had the game weirdly within reach, thanks to a three run Beltran homer, until the bullpen, specifically Guillermo Mota, imploded and eliminated any chances the Mets might have had of a comeback. The bullpen is the definite, glaring weakness of the team, and one questions Randolph’s sanity for returning to Mota miserable outing after miserable outing, but, really, who else has he got? Mota has been terrible, but its not like there is some really good reliever hanging out, forgotten, in the Mets pen, that Willie Randolph is refusing to go to out of stubbornness…well, there is Joe Smith…

The problem, though, is that the Mets are not quite this terrible against teams other than the Phillies, and one can’t help but think that this goes back to Jimmie Rollins’ much publicized statement that the Phillies, and not the reigning champion Mets, were the team to beat in the NL East. This afforded everyone on both teams a nice opportunity to talk tough in spring training, and gave the beat reporters a couple free inches of minor news; it also created an extra incentive for both teams to play well against each other. In these games, the games where there was something intangible at stake, in addition to the games in the standings, the Mets played pathetically. These games, against the upstart Phillies, seem to be the closest that the Mets have faced in the regular season to a playoff atmosphere, where they will be forced to come through with the season on the line.

The notion of the ‘clutch performers’ is not taken very seriously by Sabermatricians; apparently, if you do the math, it all boils down to chance. Indeed, if this were a different sort of blog, I would probably turn to the strange kabala of statistics and match-ups to try and account for the Phillies dominance of the Mets. As it is, I can only hope that the Sabermatricians are right, and that my feeling that this is an erratic, gutless, and nervous team, unable to perform under pressure, is grossly uninformed. The Mets have enough of a lead, and an easy enough schedule the rest of the way, that they will, almost certainly, end up in the playoffs; but in the NLDS, a short series played under pressure, I am not particularly fond of the Mets’ odds.

Of course, the Phillies still have a more than decent shot at the post-season, via the wild card, in which case I would have to revise my prediction of a first round exit for the Mets. If the Phillies do, in fact make the playoffs, I think that the only thing to expect would be the NL East teams contending for the NLCS. If this does come to pass, I actually like the Mets odds: the Mets are a historically unlucky team, but Philadelphia is one of the more cursed cities when it comes to professional sports, and the Phillies regular season dominance of the Mets seems like it could be only setting the Phillies up for an extra excruciating post-season defeat--in much the same way that Smarty Jones, the last championship caliber thing to come out of Philadelphia, won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, leading the citizenry of Philadelphia to wager on him heavily for the Belmont, in which he was fairly unimpressive.

I won the Kentucky Derby!!

More accurately, I failed to bet on the Kentucky Derby do to laziness, doubt about where to put my money, and a lack of initiative- but none of the horses that I had been remotely considering did anything, so I say I won.

I had big plans for the Kentucky Derby. I was going to put my money on the horse Paul Lo Duca picked, and then use the winnings to buy a Paul Lo Duca jersey. Then, armed with the jersey of a notorious gambler, purchased with Kentucky Derby winnings- which would have to figure to be one of the luckiest shirts of all time- I was going to go and break the bank at Mohegan Sun and get out of the sub-sub-librarian racket.

But Major League Baseball put a damper on things from the start: they don’t even sell a Paul Lo Duca jersey. Except for a ‘80s retro jersey, and I’m not sure that insanely expensive baseball kitsch can ever really be lucky.

Paul Lo Duca’s derby credentials are basically that he picked Giacamo, one of the biggest upsets in Derby history, to win in 2005. That year, a George Steinbrenner owned horse, Bellamy Road, was so heavily favored that experts were wondering why they were even bothering to run the race; but Bellamy Road finished way out of it and was last seen giving rides at one of Mariano Rivera’s kid’s birthday parties. You have to figure that the picks of a guy who catches for the Mets, and won on an upset in a year when Steinbrenner lost, would be pretty damn lucky.

Before the 2005 Derby, Drew and I went to the track at Aqueduct. Drew won big on Bellamy Road, and latter achieved a victory similar to the one that I had this year in the Kentucky Derby.

Anyway, this year Lo Duca picked Tiago, half brother to Giacamo, from the same breeder and trainer, and ridden by Mike Smith, who is apparently a friend of Lo Duca’s. According to the few turf-for-dummies type sources that I checked, Tiago didn’t look any better than his half-brother going into the thing and paid significantly worse. Thus, it seemed that Lo Duca was picking a bad horse for sentimental reasons- and while my trust in Lo Duca was based on a feeling that his pick would be lucky, I was unsure about weather luck would outweigh stupidity. Normally, I chose horses based on long odds and funny names, but this year there was nothing that really appealed to me, and after Lo Duca homered in Friday’s game, I had almost decided to go and put my shirt on Tiago. Fortunately, the line at the OTB on the Upper East Side was ridiculously long, and I realized that I had to get back to work.