Just Mets

The Mets were defeated by the Rays by the score of 4-3 on Sunday afternoon at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. Here are my takeaways from the loss…

The continued struggles of Bartolo Colon.

After appearing to take a step forward in his last start in Miami, the 42-year-old Colon struggled on the mound once again today. For the second straight game a Mets starter was unable to hold onto an early 3-0 lead, an unexpected trend from a team built on pitching and facing the 27th ranked offense in baseball this weekend.

Colon looked solid early, but faltered late as his two-seamer was once again leaking over the middle of the plate, leading to a lot of well struck balls and the eventual game-tying double in the 5th and game-winning home run in the 7th.

For the eighth time in his last 16 starts, Colon has now allowed four or more earned runs in a game.

A disheartening series loss.

After the thrilling comeback victory on Friday night, this wound up being a pretty deflating series for the Mets. The last two games at Tropicana Field featured two early 3-0 leads, both of which were blown by the starting pitcher, and in each game the Mets never scored after the 2nd inning.

The hope is that this is a blip on the radar for a team coming off a long winning streak, rather than a trend. However, if the Mets really want to be a playoff team this season, they obviously cannot afford to continue to blow leads and play this poorly away from home.

Other notes from Sunday:

Lucas Duda is now 4-for-his-last-23 with 10 strikeouts.

Daniel Murphy delivered the team’s only RBI hit of the day, a two-run single in the 2nd inning against Chris Archer.

Michael Conforto went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and is now hitting .222 this season.

In the final two games of this series, the Mets struck out a total of 29 times.