The Mets have a Walk-Off offense. And not in the good way of a lot of Walk Off wins. No, the Mets are the best team in baseball at scoring early, going home, and then losing. Tonight’s debacle was a paradigmatic game for this season’s game, and also a good reminder of what last year was like. Hot start, then sit back and watch the other team catch up.
Sure, there’s the bullpen side. The bullpen just blew their 10th 9th inning lead this year. Ouch. But tonight the bullpen gave up 3 runs in 7 and a third. Yes, they could have saved the game by holding the Phils to one run in 4 innings, but the bullpen shouldn’t get the blame on this one. There’s Pedro, giving up 5 in 5 innings.The starting rotation looking a little shakier with Maine on the DL and Martinez failing tonite.
But a big story here is the offense’s consistent late inning failures. I think the stat I saw showed the Mets as the second best team this decade in the early innings. But they get outscored late. 7 runs in the first 4 innings tonite. Then shut out for 9 innings.
Willie Randolph’s biggest complaint about this team last year was that there was no killer instinct. That they couldn’t finish things off.
I agree with the stats guys that the psychological facets of the game are generally grossly overstated, that we like humanizing the game by reading psychological reasons into statistical variances. But I’ve got to wonder about this one. Is there some mindset that the Mets have when the game starts that they don’t have later? And can that be fixed? Soon?!
Posted by Gil Reich 
