Mets 8 Pirates 7

Thankfully, there weren’t too many impressionable kids in the stands, and hopefully, there weren’t too many aspiring youngsters watching the game on TV — because the Mets and Pirates put on a clinic on how NOT to play baseball.

In the end, the Mets were less terrible than the Pirates, and wound up with more runs than the visitors at the conclusion of the contest. And “contest” is a pretty suitable word, as the “winner” seemed to have won a sweepstakes contest rather than earned a game victory.

Unfortunately, not only was this a three-hour disgrace to professional baseball, but Jenrry Mejia left the game in the third inning with pain in the back of his shoulder.

Game Notes

Maybe I’m being a bit tough on these two teams, but if you saw the third and fourth frames, you’d feel similarly. The Mets played like an A ball club, making errors, displaying poor fundamentals, and Raul Valdes serving up BP fastballs. But the Pirates were even worse, looking like a bad high school JV team, as they handed the Mets 7 runs in the bottom half of the fourth via a multitude of physical and mental errors and just plain bad baseball.

Fittingly, the top Mets minor leaguers were honored in a postgame ceremony.

The boxscore reported an attendance of 29,000. There is absolutely no way there were that many people at the game. I’d be surprised if there were half that many, in reality. The promenade level was almost completely empty, and the lower levels were sparse.

Of the 15 combined runs scored in this game, 9 were earned. Only 3 errors were listed by the official scorer, but there were at least three times as many mental errors and pull-your-hair-out displays of poor execution.

After the game, the Mets reported that Jenrry Mejia suffered an “acute strain” in the back of his shoulder and will receive an MRI right away. You have to wonder why Mejia — who is more or less the crown jewel of the farm system — wasn’t shut down after his injury in late June. Oh, because Omar Minaya still needed reasons to save his job, such as proving his ability to build a minor league system that could produce MLBers. I don’t care if the MRI shows nothing wrong — the Mets absolutely, positively must shut down Mejia for the remainder of the year if they care one bit about his future.

By the way, I stick to my belief that Mejia’s mechanics are flawed and dangerous. The illogical decisions to make Mejia a reliever then back to a starter likely accelerated the inevitable injury.

Next Mets Game

Thanks to the fact they are playing perhaps the worst team in baseball right now, the Mets have a valid shot at being over .500 by Thursday night. If the rain holds up, Mike Pelfrey faces Charlie Morton, who has a 1-11 record and a 9.05 ERA — numbers that hark us back to fond memories of the late Jose Lima.