Busting recaps

I just have one comment on Friday's game: I told you Seo.

I'd also like to weigh in belatedly on Saturday's game, which was almost a disaster not soon to be forgotten by those fans in attendance or watching at home. I don't have a problem with removing Pedro after six innings and 78 pitches. Tom Seaver does*, but I'm beginning to think his brain has a thick candy shell.

No, what I have a problem with is the employment and even occasional deployment of one Daniel "Danny" Graves. A friend and fellow Met fan asked me on Thursday who the most egregious (his word) member of the bullpen was. I answered without much hesitation, because the guy doesn't have much real competition for that title. He's really, truly awful.

While any combination of relievers should be expected to nail down an eight run lead for three innings, if you for some reason wanted to make it as interesting as possible, throwing Danny G. out there is a good start.

So, how did yesterday's game three go, you ask? Frankly, not too well.

The top of the 1st: a litany of base hits - many of them of the ill-gotten seeing-eye lookie-here fluketastic variety - continued out of control until Benson just had to be removed so he could sit there catatonic in the dugout repeating "Christian Guzman" and rocking back and forth like a spectral Leo Mazzone.

Bottom 5: Anderson and Diaz single, and Mike Jacobs gets the call to pinch hit in his first major league at-bat. We all know what happens, the lefty-hitting youngster takes a low fastball from Loaiza and crushes it to right field. Mets now trail 7-3. Neither Seaver nor the other guy in the WB booth mentioned this, but Jacobs had been going kind of bonkers in the Eastern League. Sure, he's a little old (24) for the circuit, but .321/.376/.589 with 25 homers is - pardon the expression - the real.

Several junctures in the later innings: Mets get one or two baserunners with zero or one outs and squander the bejeezus out of the opportunity. Cairo, Castro, and Floyd left 3, 4, and 5 runners on base, respectively. Cliff racked up three of those five in a single, humiliating at bat:

With the bases loaded and two out, Frank Robinson brings in Joey Eischen to face Floyd. Both pitcher and hitter are lefties with unusual platoon splits. Floyd struggles less than most lefty hitters against LHP, and Eischen has actually been shutting righties down (.576 OPS against) more effectively than lefties (.759), for a "reverse" split. In short, the matchup is far more favorable than one might expect. So I'm thinking how great this is, that Robinson's knee-jerk move could easily make this a squeaker or even a tie game, when Cliff takes a long, ugly swing for strike one on a sweeping hook that landed low and way outside. Hmmm. Surely he'll be wary of that one, I think. Strikes two and three: Same pitch, same location, same lunging swipe by Floyd, and that was all she wrote.

Tom Glavine gets the ball tonight at the BoB. He'll be opposed by the pride of Ashland, KY, Brandon Webb. The Mets are 3 games out of the wild card.

* Although he got very defensive when asked to reconcile this criticism with his approval of Frank Robinson's pulling his positional regulars at the same point in the game. His argument was that pitchers get four days of rest anyway, while the positional guys don't. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to find the flaw(s) in that one.