The Mets' Turn

You know the camera adds a few.. hundred pounds.

Man, am I tired of these painful losses piling up against the Mets. If there’s one team I’d really rather not see the Phillies lose to it’s those underachievers from Queens. The Phils have now dropped 10 straight against their division rivals. 10 STRAIGHT! The Mets are 13-1 against the Phils this season and are 73-58 on the season, 6.5 games up on the even more underachieving Nationals.

That means the Mets are a measly 3 games above .500 at 60-57 against the rest of the MLB. It’s one thing to be losing a ton of games to the same team.. But to basically hand the division over to the Mets on a silver platter because the Phils can’t seem to play competent baseball against a team that can certainly pitch, but only recently learned how to hit is just maddening as a fan. In the 14 games the Phils have played against the Mets this year, the Mets have ran up 86 runs while only allowing 44. That’s right, the Mets are averaging just over 6 runs per game while the Phils are barely pushing across more than 3. The Mets +42 run differential against the Phillies accounts for 76% of their +55 run differential on the season. In other words, the Mets are an average at best baseball team unless they’re playing the Phillies.

Another incredibly frustrating part of this is that 42 year old professionally fat Bartolo Colon has absolutely dominated the Fightin’s in his 4 starts against them this year. He is 4-0 with a 2.33 ERA in 27 innings with 29 strikeouts and only 1 home run allowed. His total numbers for the season are pedestrian at best at 12-11 with a 4.42 ERA while currently leading the league in hits allowed. The man is listed at 5’ 11” 285 pounds. SMH.

Most people from this area will tell you the team that they “sports hate” (sports hate is a term Bill Simmons came up with because you don’t really hate these teams or players in real life, it’s just a sports hate)  the most is the Cowboys or New York Football Giants. But not me, I’ve always had a generous helping of sports hate in my heart for the Mets. It stemmed from the mid-aughts when the Phils were up and coming and the Mets had their flash in the pan.

Billy Wagner always rubbed me the wrong way, especially some comments he made about teammates not pulling weight and then he went and blew a game late in the 2005 season that cost the Phils a chance at the Wild Card. Then he went to the Mets and that added to my sports hate. But the biggest thing was really going to Citizen’s Bank Park to see a Mets game and seeing all of the goddamn Mets fans invade the ballpark. If it’s one thing that really gets to you as a fan, it’s seeing the visiting team get cheered more loudly than the home team at your ballpark. There was plenty of that in the 4 game shellacking the Mets put on the Phils last week. Man, it just really irks me. That’s where my sports hate stems from and now it’s coming full circle.

I’ll tell you what though, what the Mets are doing to the Phillies right now doesn’t mean jack squat compared to the hurting the Phils put on them in 2007. In 2007, the Mets were coming off a wire-to-wire runaway division win and were looking to do it again. Then came the Phils. In late August the Mets held a 6 game lead when they came to Philadelphia only to get swept out in a 4 game series that included several memorable games including a walkoff single from Chase Utley in an 11-10 barnburner of a day game. Two weeks later the Phils went up to Queens and the division lead was back up to 5.5 for the Mets, who got swept yet again by the relentless ’07 squad.

From there the Phils never looked back. They took the division in '07 and the four following years, leaving the Mets to wallow in self-pity. So what the Mets are doing now, beating up on a hapless squad that doesn’t have a chance to be good anyway, is frustrating as a fan who sports hates the Mets so much. But it’s got nothing on ripping the heart out of an actual contender and laughing on your way to the playoffs. Take your division this year New York, you’re earning it on the backs of Jerome Williams, Jerad Eickhoff, and Hector Neris. Good luck getting any team from the NL Central in the playoffs.