Mets hit rock-bottom in ugly loss to Colorado
Jeff McNeil of the Mets flies out to end the second inning against the Rockies at Citi Field on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Here’s one thing we learned about the Mets this past week.
Remember that soft spot in the schedule, the post-Atlanta stretch in which Buck Showalter & Co. supposedly were going to fatten up against the weaker teams?
Well, that’s how everyone is going to be welcoming the Mets now after Sunday’s stomach-turning 13-6 loss to the Rockies. Their 11th defeat in the last 14 games dropped the Mets below .500 (17-18) for the first time since April 5 (3-4) and exposed them as a badly misfiring group with no viable solutions at the moment.
For the second straight game, Showalter shuffled the lineup, this time benching Starling Marte and moving Brett Baty up to fifth (at this rate he’ll be hitting cleanup by the middle of next week).
That juggling helped get the Mets six runs — more than they had scored in the previous four games combined (four) — including three in the first inning.
Problem solved, right? Not quite. It should have been more, and because the Mets are a bad team right now, bad stuff happened. And in this instance, it was their own fault.
When Luis Guillorme ripped what appeared to be an RBI single to rightfield, Kris Bryant nullified the run by alertly firing the cutoff throw to second base, where Daniel Vogelbach was caught napping for the third out — before Baty crossed the plate.
Mistakes happen. And Vogelbach was a stand-up guy afterward, explaining that he allowed himself to creep off the base while watching for an errant throw, potentially giving him the chance for third. But the Mets are losing games in every manner possible these days, and they can ill afford to kick runs away, particularly with unforced errors like brain cramps.
“To make an out on the bases, especially when you got a guy on the ropes like that, I regretted it all game,” Vogelbach said. “I watched it over and over again and it was just kind of a freak thing . . . I think you guys all know that I want to win more than anybody. It’s just a play that I messed up. If I don’t make that play, who knows where the game goes?”
He’s right about that. This was the Rockies, whose 4.96 ERA ranked 26th in the majors (Coors Field obviously doesn’t help), and another nudge or two should have crumbled their pitching staff like a Jenga stack. But Vogelbach’s blunder gave them an escape hatch.
Despite the terrible optics, Showalter didn’t consider it worthy of pulling him from the game, say as a wake-up call to a team that’s been sleepwalking for nearly a dozen games or so.
“It’s something that Daniel probably wishes he had over,” Showalter said. “We did a lot of other things to make that not matter in a bad way.”
We’ll side with Showalter on this one. It wasn’t a situation in which Vogelbach failed to run or forgot the outs. He just let himself drift into no-man’s-land and Bryant made him pay for it. Plus the Mets have bigger issues that can’t be solved by sending messages — such as getting their rotation and lineup to be competitive on a nightly basis.
If the trio of Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Kodai Senga can’t help the Mets pull out of this funk against the 14-19 Reds this week, that’s going to be a serious red flag. As for the lineup, Showalter’s hands are mostly tied unless general manager Billy Eppler decides to summon Ronny Mauricio and Mark Vientos in the near future. Eppler dispatched special assistant Carlos Beltran to Triple-A Syracuse over the weekend to scout the duo, but they might not be ready to play that card just yet.
What else do the Mets need to see? Sunday’s loss was especially demoralizing, and Pete Alonso stared blankly into his locker afterward, still upset with the called third strike on him that spoiled a bases-loaded rally with one out in the fourth inning.
He had reason to be upset — the changeup clearly was out of the strike zone, high and outside.
“I don’t want to swing at that pitch because I needed a hockey stick to hit it,” he said. “Earlier in the game, we did a great job and I felt like we had pretty decent at-bats all day. Just a tough day overall.”
But are those six runs just a mirage? Even if the Mets had scored a dozen Sunday, they still would have lost. Somehow it’s become a struggle for them to play winning baseball, and eventually the patience fizzles while waiting for track records to kick in. They fell into a second-place tie with the Marlins (not a typo) and trail division-leading Atlanta by seven games.
“We control it,” Showalter said. “It’s not like there’s some outside element — just play better.”
Easier said than done. Because these Mets, as currently constructed, keep looking worse.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
