Mets Game 120: Loss To Nationals
Nationals 7 Mets 1
A solid five frames by Rafael Montero. Let’s leave it at that.
Mets Game Notes
Nice job by Rafael Montero to keep his sinking fastball at the knees and maybe an inch or two below, on both sides of the plate. If there’s a criticism, it’s that, in two-strike counts, he picked outside the corners looking for batters to chase at strike three, instead of going after them. Trying to strike out every single hitter leads to high pitch counts and too many walks; the better pitchers throw strikes in locations that make hitting them squarely more difficult based on how the hitter was set up in a particular at-bat. Montero’s velocity — if we can trust the SNY radar readings — was higher than I expected. He was regularly in the 92-93 MPH range, and I thought he was more 90-91. Maybe it was adrenaline?
I’d rather not get into the bad stuff that happened to Montero and the Mets in this game. Let’s pretend that rain ended the game after five frames and the Mets lost 2-0 … mmmmmmkay?
Doug Fister is a pretty decent athlete, and has a good swing — he looks more like a position player than a pitcher at the plate (for whatever that’s worth). I’m mildly surprised he has only two hits this year, but I guess part of it is that he’s never hit against MLB pitching on a regular basis before.
Next Mets Game
Mets and National do it again at 7:10 PM on Wednesday night. Bartolo Colon faces Jordan Zimmerman.
Much has been made of the Mets’ positive run differential and their bad luck in one-run games, but in fact they’ve been excellent in such contests in the second half (they’re now 18-23, way up from 10-21 or whatever it was), yet they remain well under .500.
Well, their run differential is negative now, and the key difference is that, in the first half, the Mets had a huge run advantage in games decided by 6 runs or more (at one point it was +30 runs). They’re in the minus columns in blowout contests with this latest loss.
And what this all boils down to is? They need two more bats, duh. If David Wright is one of them next year, great. He hasn’t been one this year.
If true, that extrapolates to 32 homeruns in 100 innings…and 64 homeruns in 200 innings. Obviously no ML team would pitch him 200 innings at that homerun rate because that performance isn’t tenable.
Hopefully he can sort these issues out, specifically the problems with the long ball.
There’s been talk that Montero projects as a middle reliever, but I don’t think you want a reliever who gives up a ton of homeruns. Then again, if his exposure is limited to an inning or two, he can focus on honing two pitches and make them really good to great, rather than having four mediocre-to-good pitches as a starter.
It’s only been a few games, and the way he locates his fastball he could be effective if he can come up with one really good secondary pitch. But isn’t that the case with most young pitchers?