We can’t imagine what it must have been like last night for a Mets fan to stay up for the ending of the Mets-Astros game. As if you hadn’t been through enough pain this season, you had to watch R.A. Dickey (brilliant again) give up a ninth-inning, game-tying homer (because the Mets are missing a closer for some reason) and then have to watch the Mets blow one scoring opportunity after another. For the night, they left sixteen runners on and hit two-for-thirteen with runners in scoring position; that’s a recipe for bashing one’s face against the wall. Then Ike Davis finally hit a sac fly in the top of the fourteenth, Manny Acosta impersonated a closer in the bottom of the inning, the Mets were back at .500 again. That’s a lot of effort to make it back to sea level; if Acosta had blown that save, with all the Mets have been through in the last fortnight, even the die-hards would have started taking hostages.
As it is, the Mets must now go 32-10 the rest of the way to make the playoffs under our shady-math rubric, and that’s going to be awfully difficult if David Wright isn’t all right. (Okay, it’s going to be awfully difficult if he’s fine.) The Mets third-baseman left in the twelfth last night because of nausea and light-headedness. Fortunately, it wasn’t anything concussion-related — there might have been something with the food in Houston, considering Josh Thole said he felt ill in a similar fashion — but Wright was still vomiting after the game and might not play tonight.
One last note of amusement from the game: We were curious, listening to the game as we fell asleep, just how many innings the game would have to go for Oliver Perez to be allowed to pitch. He hasn’t thrown since August 1 (when he gave up four runs in two innings) but is still sitting out in the bullpen, making $74,000 a game (the same amount he’ll make next year), sorta hoping no one notices him, sorta hoping the Mets don’t arrange to have him shot. May we repeat: Oliver Perez makes $74,000 a game for the rest of this season and all of the next. And it probably would require another twenty-inning game for them to pitch him. Nice gig, if you can get it.