Regional Sports

Where do Mets go from here?

The Mets play 80 more games this season, but they unofficially ended their season for all intents and purposes Thursday afternoon when Mets closer Edwin Diaz blew a 3-1 lead and in the end, Diaz and the Mets took a 6-3 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

Four blown leads in five games by the inept Mets bullpen and five blown leads in a row overall by the Mets should take a toll on the team by now that they don’t recover from it, especially after Thursday’s blown save. The Mets fans lost their patience. Who can blame them after watching this for the first three months of the season? At some point, what they see is what they get.

The Mets established themselves as an incompetent team. At times, they struggled to hit. Their bullpen pitched awful since April. Their starting rotation never clicked. Three months of this shows they are not a playoff team. The Mets are 37-45 on merit.

Quite frankly, they never were in the first place. They never were as good as the Atlanta Braves. There’s no athleticism on that roster, and their bullpen is worthless. 20 blown saves (major league worst) by this sorry bullpen this season, and that bullpen was not even good last year without Diaz, so to expect much from mainly the same characters was too much to ask. How bad is it? The Mets have more blown saves at 20 than saves at 18.

So much has been made about the Mets’ recent road trip as the team’s last stand, but reality says the Mets season ended altogether in the second week of May when teams exposed their flaws.

Sure the Mets will say they will keep playing and hoping things go their way, but you expect them to say it and do it being that they are paid professionals. They will offer cliches about they are due to play their best baseball. They will mention pap about everything will come together.

Mets fans know better. The Mets don’t have much bullpen depth, and their three best relievers in Seth Lugo, Jeurys Familia and Diaz offer no confidence with how awful they pitched this season. If a team has a bad bullpen, they are not going to win many games, and that’s been the Mets’ problem this year. It’s hard to think things are changing now.

It will get worse before it gets better.

This speaks to why the Mets are not going to fire Mickey Callaway in season. No manager can turn a team around if his relievers fail him. If the Mets thought this was salvageable, he would have been gone a long time ago.

The only way the team fires Callaway in season if the Mets have a 10-game losing streak or things have gone so ugly in the clubhouse that the team has no choice but to fire him. It could be getting to that point if the Mets are in the trajectory they are in.

The only interesting part about this season is this: How low the Mets can go?

Fans love a good train wreck, but the Mets are just not interesting enough for Mets fans to watch. They saw enough. It becomes boring, depressing and unwatchable when the Mets lose the way they have been losing during their five-game losing streak.

There’s no reason to talk about the Mets anymore this season. There’s no incentive to watch them on television or attend games at Citi Field.

The Mets could be in a position where they could play in front of small crowds this summer at Citi Field. While this won’t hurt the Wilpons financially since they print money no matter what, it’s not good optics for players to play in front of small crowds. Nothing worse for a team than fan apathy, especially in a proud baseball town like New York.

The Mets can say they have nowhere to go but up. They can say it can’t get any worse. But that’s tempting fate. They are not good enough where everything evens out in the end. After all, this is the Mets. They know how to lose. They find hideous ways to lose. It’s what sorry organizations do.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the Mets finish the season in last place. I like their chances.

As the great Brodie Van Wagenen would say to the Miami Marlins, come get us.

Related Articles

Check Also
Close