I'm giving this another shot, after last year's 5/6th attempt at a 27 game report (if you noticed, I never did the final one). This time, I'm using the pages in the calendar to write my monthly report.
The bookkeeping - the Mets are 11-16 over 27 games in April, in last place in the NL East 7.5 games out of first, in 14th place in the entire National League, and 25th overall in the Majors.
Looking over the game-by-game results, short of 3 and 6 game winning streaks, it just looks downright awful. They've also been swept in 2 doubleheaders, which happened to be on consecutive playing dates. They looked a bit streaky in April. Well, they were. 1 loss and 2 wins were not part of streaks of at least 2 games. In other words, for most of the month, they won some in a row, then lost some in a row, then won some in a row, and so on.
In the winning streaks, they looked like a really good team, the one that we all think they're capable of being, especially in the 6 game streak after Jason Bay returned to the lineup. But they had a lot of losses where they looked like a team that wanted to be broken up and sold off in pieces. In some ways, this streaky team isn't much different from what we saw last year.
But there's a few things very different from last year. Sandy Alderson and Terry Collins. Collins' managing style is very different from that of Jerry Manual. But will it work with this group of players (mostly the same core from last year)? I'm not sure. But that's in part, the players' problem. And together, Collins and Alderson have held players accountable more than I remember any Mets Manager and GM in recent years. They did a good job of not losing players during Spring Training moving to the Opening Day roster because of various contract clauses, then dumped players who underperformed after the season started. I love it. It's a bold statement...even if it's for fringe players.
So what's the next move? Or does the team turn it on again when they get home and we put off this discussion for another week? It's possible that this team really isn't as talented as we've been sold to believe. If the team has a .500 or worse May, I think it will be time for serious thought about trading off "talented" players.
Leave a comment or drop me a line at DyHrdMET [at] gmail [dot] com. "Like" RememberingShea on Facebook (the function formerly known as "Becoming a Fan"). Become a Networked Blog
