Philadelphia Phillies' Jimmy Rollins points skyward after hitting a triple in the first inning of a baseball game with the Washington Nationals, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2007, in Philadelphia. The Phillies won 6-1 taking the Eastern Division Championship.(AP Photo/Tom Mihalek)Well, the greatest collapse in regular season history now belongs to the Mets. The game was over in the top of the first, as Glavine only recorded one out and gave up a whopping 7 earned runs. If not for a wild pitch by Dontrelle Willis, the Mets would've been shut out.
There will be some riveting radio tonight (and for months to come, I expect) about what went wrong with the Mets, whose fault this is and what should be done for next year. There'll be a lot of talk about firing Willie Randolph. This collapse isn't his fault. If you have a bullpen that can't hold a 5-run lead, what are you supposed to do? Every single pitcher in that pen went south in September. No one could be trusted.
If you have starting pitchers and position players in their 40's, how much can you expect from them? This is not unlike what the Yankees went through, but they had young arms in the minors that were able to rescue the club. This looks more like a GM issue, but even there it's not clear how much Omar Minaya could do, especially mid-season when it was clear that they needed pitching help, but so did every other team.
As for the one-game tie-breaker tomorrow for the NL Wildcard, I'm picking the Rockies. They are tough at Coors Field (they swept both the Mets and Yankees there in June/July) and they're a better offensive team than the Padres.
2 comments:
This was such BULLSHIT!!! I can't believe these cats blew a 7 game lead a week ago and lost the division on the last day of the year. Who in the fu@# does THAT??? I mean, I swear to you. I'd love to say that a fix was in, but the Phillies didn't do shit that was great.
The Mets just imploded on a monumental scale. Not one damn bullpen pitcher could stop the bleeding. These guys blew 6 run leads, 5 run leads, 4 and 3 run leads, late in the game. They need to do some real soul searching in the off season and think about the greatest collapse in baseball history. Or is it sports now?
They need to get some young arms, a decent bridge of pitchers to get them from middle relief to a lockdown closer. Dude, what's his name again? The lefty closer was like John Wetteland in the late 90's. Only difference was, Wetteland made you sweat before he shut the door and got the save. Think about all of those blown saves that Wagner (that's his name) blew this year. What was it? 6 of them?
They only needed for him to win one of them and they'd be off to face the Padres. Meet the New York Mess! The greatest chokers in history! Go Yankees!!!!
If a fix was in, it would've gone against the Phillies, not in their favor. The Phillies earned their crown. They wanted it more.
The Mets spent most of their season acting like they'd won something, which was nuts considering that they'd lost the NLCS to a Cardinals team that had only won 83 games.
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