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Johan Santana, talking to reporters after last night’s game:
“This whole series, they played great baseball, they did the little things and they took advantage of it and we didn’t. And that’s the reason why they won the game and won the series. I mean, we tried, but they were better.”
…okay, well, there you have it…
According to the New York Post, Braves fans chanted, “Ov-er-rat-ed,” as the Mets left the dugout following last night’s loss.
…it had to be the Braves…of all the teams, in all of the league…ugh…
…however, johan is right…the Braves out-hustled the Mets in every moment of this series…what’s worse, as the game went on, while the Mets continued to play hard, they also played sloppy and looked like they were all trying to do too much, not too little, and thus made some pretty costly mistakes…
…most fans like to think that the solution to a slide like this is to play more aggressive, to play harder, to hustle more, etc., but, according to SNY’s Lee Mazzilli, and so many other baseball voices, the solution is to actually slow the game down…“Let the game come to you,” as they like to say…instead, right now, the Mets are pressing, and look tight, and so mistakes will happen and losses will pile up, especially when playing a team as hot and loose as the Braves, who can afford to take chances and play more aggressive…
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Last night after the loss, I switch over to catch the end of the Yankee game just in time to see Joe Girardi go ballistic over a blown call by the umpire…
The fans went wild and gave him a standing ovation, the Yankees promptly bring in the winning run and all hell breaks loose at the stadium…
Then I switch back and watch a low-key Willie Randolph recite the same old, tired cliches – absolutely emotionless – no fire in the belly…
This team needs leadership – NOW
The fan’s Willie watch will begin soon. But lets face some reality who out there will be better. Yes they choked last year and Willie is conservative in many ways ala Joe Torre. Do you look to Maz, bring Bobby V back, not likely, Clint Hurdle- genius last year and this year what? By JUly trades need to be made or it could be too late because we are free falling.
It is the manager’s job to set the tone for his players.
Willie acts as if he has no real power. He appears to be a man locked into his thoughts…no emotion…no real expression of his expectations.
He has said he does not argue umpire calls because he believes they will then be more likely to call against him after. It would not surprise me if he had the same fear when it comes to dealing with his players…afraid that they are beyond his influence.
Atlanta’s manager Wants to Win. The difference in attitude and performance of his players is obvious. They don’t win all the time but they play to win with each pitch.
Atlanta’s manager blows his top at umpire calls – gets thrown out, but then its over. My guess is that he is the same way with his players. He calls one to his office; blows his top, and then its over.
Willie is afraid to do this. He is afraid he will be punished if he does.
I saw that in the paper this morning and thought “great, a whole other day of ‘firey’ posts. hooray.”
I think the Mets need to show a lot more emotion, manager included. I think the team as a whole is being over aggresive case in point is Castillo idiotic throw home instead of to first with two outs in the inning. I think that maybe if Hudson charged the mound last night after his high and tight pitch that he got from Santana and the Mets got into a fight especially with the much hated Braves the Mets might just come out swinging from now on. I dunno..I am just thinking of different ways to fire up this team as I am mad and frustrated as the next Met fan….
Braves fans (all 17 of them) can say what ever the heck they want.
Because when the team you root for wipes the floor with it’s so-called “rival”, then that automatically gives you carte blanche.
Hey, I’m just surprised they were able to tear themselves away from the Singles Bar and Baby GAP and whatever else they have at Turner Mall. I mean, half of the people attending last night didn’t realize they were at a ballgame.
the cards sang and whooped it up on the mets in 06….”jose jose jose ”
then the nats, cards and phillies and fans got all chirpy and sang danced and laughed in the mets faces in 07..
and this year the nats and braves have all had a laugh and whooped it up on the mets……so far…
and once again randolph talks of learning lessons, payback and turning pages……
“payback ” ????yeah right …. willie and the boys sure are doing alot of learning and paying back….
Maz is 100% correct.
For example, when Jose gets out he always overswings. With men on base the Mets are constantly swinging too hard. They need to go back to the basics and just try to hit the ball up the middle or where it is pitched. They need to get the simple out, not make the super play. Those only happen on balls you have to run after. Pitchers are trying to finesse their way to outs instead of playing simple country hardball. They need to throw strikes, not try to get outs. The fielders will get the outs.
This is significant because Willie has to take the pressure off of his players. He doesn’t know how to do this. He needs to explode on an umpire to make himself the focus of attention. He needs to preach to the Mets to do anything to get on base. Its nothing more simple than that. When a guy is in scoring position, they don’t need to think of how to get that big hit, they need to think of how to get on base and if everyone does that they will score more runs.
I think Willie lost his golden opportunity to go off on an umpire with the bad call of Delgado’s homer on Sunday. Anything I think he does now will look in bad light to the Wilpon’s. I still think the Mets need a fight. They fought back in 86′. Look what that team did!
Pressing is correct. Players tend to try and pull everything in an attempt to hit the 5 run homer with no one on base. Wright is one to watch. When he’s on, he tends to hit a lot of ball hard the other way toward right center. When he presses, he tries to pull everything and subsequently hits a lot of weak ground balls and popups.
i love how the other day on wfan , willie talking about arguing with umpires and how it’s overated……. and says …whats arguing gonna do ? you wanna stay on the good side of umps, you dont want any lingering problems…. cuz you never know when your gonna get a close call and need it to go your way … dont want any hardfeelings in the way…..
meanwhile …. willie never gets the close call…. instead they know he’s easier to face and sit down than some other manager going ballistic on them …..
infact willie gets semi close calls reversed on him……. and 3 runs taken off the board without a fight…..
good thing he’s got all the umps so chummy and on his side…
If you can convince an umpire that he is wrong, the call may stand, but you get a payback call later. I’ve umped before. It happens
I can attest to this as well.
On the next bang-bang play where the play could be called either way, your team will get the call the majority of the time.
i agree and thats my point, but willie dont convince anybody of anything… he says a few words ,sits down and never gets a call..
I don’t know, I feel like I’ve seen a couple make up calls. in fact, more than a few.
“Ov-er-rat-ed,” is probably right. The posters on here said it first:
(Paraphrased) “Maybe the Mets aren’t really better than a 0.500 team after all. Maybe they have been a 0.500 team all along and we just expected too much out of them.”
Braves just swept us in a 4 game series. They can say whatever they want.
Alban:
You could manage this team to a better than .500 record.
I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I’ll take that as a compliment.
Of course, now you’ve got me thinking: what would I do if I were managing this team? And the first thing that came to mind was to try to heal the rifts, foster team work, and do all of that outside of the ball park. Build the team chemistry again and do it in an environment that’s not baseball related. Help the guys have fun with each other again and take some of the tension/pressure out.
In my opinion, (and I’m not saying that this is the best idea, due to the safety concerns), I’d take these guys out to go paintballing. Put people who don’t normally work together in teams and force them to cooperate. And because of the nature of paintball, when one person gets knocked out, you can preach the “pick each other up” principle again. Tell people to communicate, work out strategies, and to protect one another. Of course, as I stated above, this is probably not the best idea because someone might get injured on their pitching hand… but you get the idea. Loosen up the club, build teamwork and help these guys work together again.
It’s really the players who carry this team and perform… and Willie needs to get these guys to work together again.
I agree.
The Braves showed up to play. Our players barely showed up. Atlanta can say whatever they want, they earned it.
Right now the Met fans are humiliated…and the team? Do they even care?’
I am so sick and tired of that stupid tomahawk chant………….
Unfortunately I have to agree. When the team that wins wins they way the Braves did, How can you argue?
What a joke this team is. I would rather root for the Nationals than the Mets. Because with the Nationals you expect a last place team, with the Mets you are given one.
It is pathetic right now. I feel disgraced to be a Mets fan, but I’m not jumping ship. I still have some dignity to persevere through this mess. But it hurts knowing that a game that should bring joy and excitement, has brought nothing but misery and anger.
LMFAO, I know what you mean, My wife is from Pittsburgh and I was just thinking to myself that it is time to bust out the Pirates cap!!!…LMFAO
Ahh, I think this is worse than 1993. Maybe I can get more legroom at Shea now that the bandwagon fans will jump ship. And if they continue to suck, I just might be able to get into Citi Field next year.
Amen brother, that’s what I am talking about…Isn’t it sad that you kinda have to root for your team to do bad so you can sit comfy and root with the REAL MET’S FANS>??!!!
“You will never see him panic, and you’ll never see him yelling,” He’ll be mad at us sometimes, but you won’t see it. That wouldn’t help anybody.”
“When your manager starts freaking out in the dugout, the team is going to reflect that. He doesn’t do that.”
Comment from the Met players? No, comments in today’s Post-Gazette from the Pirates. Who by the way are playing at about the same % as the Mets.
I know the excitement feeling and right now, though I’m a Met fan, I get excited watching the Pirates between innings. Why? There is a spark missing from the this team. The Pirates are overachieving, the Mets are underachieving.
Why are the Mets underachieving? Sure, the manager has something to do with it. But Torre was the Met manager and lost and he was a winner in the Bronx. Was it the manager or the players? Probably a little bit of the manager and a lot of the players.
So, who get the players? The GM does. I love Omar. He gets us some players that I don’t think we would otherwise get because of the Latin connection. I think that helps the Mets in the long run and I would hate to lose that.
I know I’m not answering much here, but
1) These Mets players are – for the most part – experienced professionals. They shouldn’t need a manager to yell and scream and light their competitive fires. So, us asking for Willie to be more emotional is that really us (the fans) compensating for the fact that these players – or at least some of them – seem to just be going through the motions and taking a paycheck?
2.) This team is old. Castillo, Alou, Delgado, Pedro, Anderson, Easley, Hernandez. For Pete sake, or should I say, for Omar sake, how do you assemble a roster like that?
3) Willie does seem to have lost the clubhouse. Not quite sure how that happened – and winning cures everything – but if you look at the Giants, Coughlin somehow changed and it wasn’t all winning. I do think that Willie has got to be a little more demonstrative – not towards the players, but towards the umpires and the press. He should have argued the Delgado home run call and gotten tossed. I think he was attempting to be a little more demonstrative towards the press the other day, but his comments were misguided. Attack the press for silly comments about the team, not the press for how they (or SNY) covers the game.
Does Willie need to be fired?
I don’t know. But this team does need a shake up. I would say to fire Omar and publically say that the Mets need to make the playoffs or it’s Willie’s last season. Put a caretaker GM in place – not Bernazard though.
There you have it. Sorry for being so long but I needed to write it to get my thoughts solidified.
Fire Omar and put Willie on public notice, playoffs this year or your gone.
Firing the GM will have absolutely no tangible on-field effect. We may was well fire the marketing staff or the grounds crew.
We got swept by the Braves, plain in simple.
Four games, no less.
At least their hat is pink. Nice, Matt.
we’re lucky Atlanta lost all those one run games…they could easily be up 3 or 4 more games on us and the division. I don’t know how their pitching has survived, but that lineup is crushing.
One thing that no one that I’ve seen–I scanned quickly, so I might have missed it–has mentioned is the fact that going into this series, the Braves had the best home record in the NL. They also have the worst road record in the NL. We went in, and they showed why they have the best home record in the NL. Maybe they’ll show us why they have the worst road record, come August.
Atlanta sucks. We’re the same team that nearly got swept in 4 games at home by the Nationals.
They played a good series and hats off to them, but that team isn’t going anyplace. We lost 4 games more than they won them. A team of trained monkeys could beat this bunch of losers right now.
that has been mentioned, and I’ve never seen such a crazy split (esp this far into the year). But the fact is they’ve outscored their opposition by 60 runs (which I think is second only to the cubs). They’re a good team, and they play hard.
the braves are my biggest nightmare, and watching them win the division this year could quite possible crush my soul. If I hadn’t already sold my soul back in high school, that is.
Sorry Matt, I’m gonna have to dispute what you wrote, that the Mets “played hard”
Some individuals may have played hard, but the unit as a
whole? Not so much.
What’s worse, they also played stupid.
Beltran caught in a rundown trying to advance on a ball hit in front of him? Gimme a break
What;s astounding over the past year is how quickly the Mets can drop into these funks. They are all presssing? WHY??? Wasn’t it 5 days ago that the team was clicking and everyone was supposedly feeling good?
Maybe that’s just it…maybe the real pressure they put on themselves is the pressure to take off on a real run.
Whatever it is, this team is broken. Fire Willie and fire whatever coaches you want, but this team needs a shakeup ON THE FIELD. You already told this bunch that last season’s collapse was ok, because you brought everyone back. This team is so obsessed with giving the appearance of stability, that they seem afraid to do anything that looks like panic or even concern.
That said, you can bet the brain trust is reviewing candidates today…but unless Omar is working the phones trying to find an on-field spark, it’s a waste of time.
I thought they were pressing because because of the booing!
I think the problem is mostly the offense… 9 runs in 4 game series! How are you going to win like that? The Mets are just pressing too much. They need to be more patient and see more balls..There was tons of first pitch swinging and 0-2 counts last night. When an opposing pitching sees this, they are going to have a field day! I’m going to start counting tonight see if it’s just my imagination.
No offense matt, but you shouldn’t post a pink atlanta hat. They just whooped us.
If anything, you should post a pink Mets hat.