Last night, the Rockies slammed the Mets 11–3, thanks to six-run third inning off John Maine. It was the second game in a row that Maine has been cuffed around, and it’s possible his role in the rotation is already in jeopardy. (His main advantage is that the Mets have no logical replacement.) The Mets are now 2–5, in last place, four games behind the Phillies.
Now, we are seven games into the season, 4 percent of the way through … nothing, really. So there is no reason to be alarmed, right? It’s an early season blip; Carlos Beltran and Daniel Murphy will be back soon; it’s all settling in — it’s far too early to be alarmed, obviously. Right. Right?
Jason Fry at Faith and Fear in Flushing, in a panicked 1 a.m. post this morning, is sounding the alarms:
I would not say I have early concerns. I’ve been concerned since last summer, when the Mets turned a season of bad luck into a pitiful farce. My concerns intensified in the offseason, when Minaya and his lieutenants operated without the slightest evidence that they were following a coherent plan. My concerns became impossible to ignore in spring training amid bizarre roster decisions and apparently willful ignorance that the starting pitching was a disaster in the making. The first seven games of the season have been just the latest bead on a depressingly long string.
As Fry points out, almost all the post-game calls were some variation on “hey, when are Minaya and Manuel being fired?” It’s seven games. It’s nothing. But the problem is that the result of the seven games is not surprising: Seven games is a statistical blip, but the way the Mets were “constructed” this off-season, there might be a lot of seven-game stretches like this one. As Fry says: It’s not getting late early. It’s already late.