West Coast Washout

In hell there's a big hotel
Where the bar just closed and the windows never opened
No phone so you can't call home
And the TV works, but the clicker is broken

-"Blonde Over Blue", by Billy Joel

And on that TV is tonight's Met/Padre game; over...and over...and over again.

Oh yeah, and the seventh inning David Wright play is edited out for time constraints.

It was a lethal mix of horrors during tonight's 8-3 loss to San Diego. Imagine having a low tolerance of alcohol and spending a night on the town with Tara Reid...that was tonight's game.

Pedro Martinez was done in by the combination of Met-killer Joe Randa (who Mark Simon reminded me was actually a member of the Mets from December 4th to December 10th 1998, thank you Mark, and check the updated hate list!), and Pedro-killer Ryan Klesko. Pedro only threw 80 pitches in his 5 innings of work, but 12 of them were used to strike out Klesko in the first inning with Dave Roberts on third (thanks to a triple which went off Mike Cameron's glove). That energy expended took it's toll on Pedro in the third as he gave up a single to Park (!), and doubles to Randa and Klesko, who just made his return from the disabled list tonight. From there the battle was steeply uphill.

Not that the Mets didn't have their chances off of Park...Mike Piazza killed a rally (great, this again) via the double play with runners on first and second with nobody out. Then, as the Mets knocked Park out of the game in the sixth with a couple of runs, David Wright came up as the tying run with momentum on the side of the Flushing nine. What happens? Reliever Scott Linebrink gets a very generous third strike call on an outside corner (?) fastball (I don't get how a pitch can be called a strike if the batter is unable to hit it with any kind of swing, but that's just me.) After Jose Santiago gave a run right back to the Padres in the bottom of that sixth inning, the game was pretty much over, save for the unreal play by David Wright (P.S. tip of the cap to Padre fans for giving Wright a nice cheer in appreciation for that play).

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The Jose Reyes streak-o-meter stops at 20 with an 0 for 4. Again, it was Klesko in the first inning who killed the Mets by making a nice play on a Reyes foul ball to help end the streak. What do you expect from a former Brave other than Met-killing?

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My friends at Friar Faithful, a sabermetric intensive Padre blog site, shows us through the magic of the dancing statistics that the Padres have the third best offense in the National League...ahead of the Cardinals. I don't fully understand the equation, but I barely passed calculus in high school (for those younger than 34, calculus is what you know as "sequential math 3"), so I trust them. However I doubt that you would get a majority of National League pitchers to say that they fear Randa, Klesko, and Brian Giles more than they fear Jim Edmonds, Albert Pujols, and even a one-legged Scott Rolen (except maybe Pedro Martinez after tonight).

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Kaz Matsui returned to action with a pinch single in the sixth.

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This kid impressed me the most when I saw him in New Orleans. His home run tonight was a typical juice box home run, barely clearing the left field fence...but it helped the Mets stay three back of Houston in the wild card chase.

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The Mets are undefeated in Joe Randa's tenure with the team.