Wednesday, September 26, 2007

One Alou's eight too few

There was good baseball news yesterday. The Phillies lost. But the good news wasn't good enough. In the Mets-Nats game, the winner also scored 10 runs. Unfortunately, the Mets weren't the winners.

They weren't beaten by a pennant contender. Instead, the lowly Washington Nationals defeated them at Shea 10-9. And for that game, the Mets didn't start a rookie pitcher. They sent Tom Glavine to the mound.

Glavine gave up six runs in five innings. The three relievers who followed him, Carlos Muniz, a late September call-up who spent most of this season in Double-A, Jorge Sosa, a failed starter turned reliever, and Aaron Sele, all failed to secure the win. Sele pitched the last two innings and gave up four hits and two runs, upping his ERA to 5.37.

Where's Billy Wagner, the newest Mets mystery man? When he's needed the most, he's unavailable, teaming instead with El Duque on the unavailable list.

But rather than dwell on a sinking ship, which is easy to do given the Mets recent pathetic pitching, I'm going to focus instead on a Met who's been struggling to keep the ship afloat: Moises Alou. Yesterday, he went 4-for-5 and drove in three runs. His batting average is now .345, not bad for someone 41 years old.

Tonight, the Mets send another rookie to the mound: Philip Humber. He's the headline story on the Mets Web site. Its heading states "Humber thrown into fire for first big league start." Think he'll be able to handle the pressure better than Pelfrey did? I doubt it. My bet is that he'll get burned, and the Mets will up their losses to 71 even though they're playing a team with a 31-46 road record.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

Five more games and both the Mets' and Phillies' regular seasons will be over. Let's hope the Mets's ship has enough lifeboats to hold all the fans who'll go down with its sinking ship.

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