Pray for Rain
Morning Dose: Thursday, May 21
☀️ Good Morning:
We obviously write from the perspective of the Mets.
But sometimes the story isn’t entirely about you.
The Nationals are playing good baseball. They aren’t world beaters, but they are .500 as we approach Memorial Day, the deepest they have been so in five years.
“A lot of these players […] are in the same boat,” first-year manager Blake Butera said last week, via The Athletic. “A lot of them … might have been a DFA pick up, waiver pickup, smaller trade pieces, they also feel like they have a chip on their shoulders to prove (something) to the teams where they came from.”
Richard Lovelady is in that boat. As Carlos Mendoza struggles to stitch together nine innings from his battered staff, the pitcher everyone loves to DFA, including the Mets five times, has emerged into a closer.
The Nats, chips on their shoulders, have become a tough out, with an offense that has scored more runs than any other team in baseball. That’s more than the Dodgers, Braves and Yankees. The Nationals!
With that context, it’s understandable why rookie Zach Thornton needed some time to adjust to his surroundings on Wednesday. You can’t leave a fastball over the middle of the plate to a hitter who has an uncanny ability to ruin starting pitcher debuts.
Credit to Thornton for settled in after a rocky start (he retired nine of the final 10 batters he faced).
But this is the situation the Mets find themselves in right now. Each day a new adventure of who might start, who can provide bulk innings in relief, and whether they can survive another outing by the depth of their bullpen — namely, Craig Kimbrel.
The Amazins dug a giant hole early in the season by refusing to hit in games a healthier pitching staff kept games close. They now can’t keep runs off the board in games their big boppers are hitting home runs.
When you pitch, you can’t hit. When you hit, you can’t pitch.
That’s the recipe for the kind of season this has become.
