Devastating

Well that sucked.

If you were a regular reader here before my extended hiatus, I apologize for it, but it must have been the absolute least of your baseball-related worries during this time.

To explain, I was out of town for work and then vacation, and then, as our beloved team plummeted further and further out of contention, it was more a sore spot than a source of enjoyment.

The Mets have now lost 11 of their last 13 games, and are two games under .500 with no chance at a playoff berth.

How could this happen? They stopped scoring runs. The most obvious culprits have been Jose Reyes, Miguel Cairo and Kazuo Matsui, all of whom have been receiving regular playing time without so much as a .700 OPS among them. Of course it takes a team effort to muster an implosion of this magnitude, and there's been plenty of blame to go around.

Some of the offensive woes are, I believe, purely situational. It seems our extra base hits have come with the bases empty, while the strikouts have come with the bases loaded.

I'll post again tomorrow with a recap of tonight's game against the Nationals, and some more postmortem on the last two weeks.