The Mets lost to the Dodgers by the score of 4-3 on Saturday in Los Angeles. Here are my takeaways from the loss…
A rough #HarveyDay in Los Angeles.
This wasn’t Harvey’s best performance, to say the least.
He lacked any sort of consistent fastball command, especially early, and had to rely predominantly on his slider and change-up to get outs this afternoon. It seemed like he couldn’t throw a strike at all with his fastball.
The good news is he recognized he didn’t have that pitch, and he immediately resorted to plan B with his slider, change-up and curveball, and while they’re all at about the same speed, he could move those pitches down in different directions which helped him survive this murky outing and get through five innings.
It wasn’t good, but he used his head and gave the Mets five innings. It could have, and probably should have been worse.
Some folks on Twitter went to the easy escape route and blamed the extra day off for Harvey’s problems on Saturday. Well, he had a 1.07 ERA with six days off or more in his career coming into play on Saturday. So, it can probably be attributed simply to a day he didn’t have it, and had to battle to find a way. All-in-all, it’s hard to complain about his gritty performance.
No chance against Zack Greinke.
Greinke wasn’t tip top on Saturday, but he was good enough to dominate this Mets offense. Of course, it doesn’t take that much to eat up the Mets bats these days. After all, this was a lineup that featured Darrell Ceciliani batting fifth, and Ruben Tejada batting sixth against a likely Cy Young Award candidate.
It seemed like all of Greinke’s pitches started in the strike zone, and ended well outside the strike zone today. He had the Mets more or less baffled, even though he wasn’t completely sharp. But again, it’s not a surprise at this point.
Too little, too late.
The Mets strung together three two-out hits in the eighth inning to cut the deficit in half against the Dodger bullpen and mounted a mini-rally in the ninth to close the deficit to 4-3. The problem was they were all singles, and once again they were very station-to-station which made it impossible for lightening to strike for this offense.
It just wasn’t enough because it came when the Mets were down by four and they came way too late in this game after showing next to no life over the first 7 2/3 innings at the plate. But, what else is new…
It wasn’t just one of those days.
Under normal circumstances, losses like this could be chalked up to one of those games in the third of the season which a team just loses. But not for the Mets. That’s because this happens most everyday these days.
It’s not just about the offense, it’s the defense too. The stink of all of this inept play is that it’s happening in a year it was supposed to matter and actually contain some meaning towards winning. It’s frustrating, it’s maddening, but what’s worse is it’s assumed they’re going to do something poor on defense, won’t hit and won’t score runs in pretty much every single night.
At some point, maybe the Mets will get some better players. Maybe.
Other notes from Saturday:
The five walks Harvey allowed matched a career-high and the most since he walked five against the Braves on August 10, 2012.
The Dodgers loaded the bases in three different innings against Harvey.
Wilmer Flores went 3-for-4 with three singles and an RBI – he now has six hits in the first two games of this series.
The Mets have scored 28 runs in their last 16 games, and they’ve scored five runs in their last 47 innings.
The Mets have now lost 11 of their last 16 games – they’ve scored 13 runs in their last 11 losses.
Just Mets 