Nice outing, Mike

Getting a full season from Johan Santana is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Mets to win the NL East. We need at least one guy behind him who's "good" and no more than one guy behind him who's "awful" (Livan Hernandez being the leading candidate for that role).

Mike Pelfrey is supposed to be good. He's our #2, followed by Maine, Perez, and Livan. So when I see that he's given up 8 earned in 4 innings against the Orioles, raising his spring ERA to a nifty 7.71, I'm not inclined to shrug it off. And Baltimore's best hitters weren't even in the lineup. This is the lineup that put a snowman on our No. 2 (respectable major league hitters in bold):

Andino

Turner

Salazar, O.

Scott

Zaun

Moore

Cabrera, J.

Christian

Moeller

Let's just hope Ollie and Maine keep up their end of the bargain.

Mike Pelfrey

It's getting harder and harder to remain skeptical about Mike Pelfrey. Forget the wins, that's a run support thing. It's that he hasn't walked anybody in his last 16.1 IP, after being a bit of a BB machine prior to that. He's also got his strikeout rate up while remaining a groundball pitcher. If you want to really get your hopes up you could take a look at fellow tall, relatively late-blooming sinkerballer Kevin Brown as a comp.

Last night's win was the Mets' ninth in a row, but I'm actually still able to retain a fair amount of skepticism about the team as a whole. Relying on Nick Evans and Fernando Tatis as starters at the outfield corners, ever, is not a tenable situation.