I don’t trust the Mets bullpen anymore. More than anything that’s what I took from last night.
They have lost ten games this year when leading after six innings. They have lost three times when they took a lead into the ninth.
I wouldn’t be disappointed if I never see Guillermo Mota again. … Pedro Feliciano is in a funk. … Aaron Heilman’s next pitch can be hit 420 feet. … Scott Schoeneweis has been erratic more than he says. … Jorge Sosa is coming back to Earth in his revised role. … Even Billy Wagner is now an adventure.
Omar Minaya said not to count on a waiver deal. Help has to come from within, which again begs the question: Why not give Mike Pelfrey a shot in the bullpen?
Am I overreacting? I really don’t think so.
33 Comments
Pelfrey…Humber…Collazo…ANYONE!!!!!!!!
JD: Thanks for stating what I have been stating the past month. ;-) Blame falls squarely on Omar for Mota and Schoenweis. Heilman has not gotten over game 7 it seems obvious which is too bad because he is the key to the pen. IF he was a reliable 8th inning guy like last year, the pen would be in good shape. I saw that Carlos Muniz was bumped to AAA. I’d like to see how he does there after 3 or 4 outings and if he does well, call him up by 9/15. Other than that, like you said there isn’t any waiver wire help out there and if they are any good , they’d be claimed. For worse, this is the pen that is going to have to take the Mets into the playoffs.
And as far as Pelfrey goes, I don’t see it. He can’t get his head together in a starting role. So I doubt he could handle the pressure of the bullpen.
I say bring up Humber to take a spot start on Saturday, inject Pelfrey in the pen for at least a week to see how he does and bring up Smith and Collazo when rosters expand.
Can we get Brian Bannister back from Kansas City? Any particular reason why he was traded away to begin with?
JD:
You said everything perfectly. I almost went to the doctor this morning because my stomach hurt so bad after last night’s meltdown. My thoughts are that the ‘pen is terrible, but everyone knows it. Including Willie. I put last night on him. He made terrible moves once Glavine came out. It’s like driving cross-country with a doughnut for a wheel. It’s there, it will work if it must, but it’s not going to get you where you need/want to be. Our spare tire is completely bald and nearly flat…and Willie just keeps on driving with it.
Re: Dan Gurney –
Brian Bannister, pitching for one of the worst teams in the majors, is 11-7 with a 3.27 ERA. He was traded for our backup 2nd baseman and a reliever who is undergoing Tommy John surgery. Wonderful.
Jay: Ruben Gotay was acquired for Jeff Keppinger. He wasn’t included in that deal. And Bannister was traded for a 23 year old fireballer who has a chance to develop into a good reliever who the Mets could surely use. He got injured. Not Omar’s fault. I’m also sure that Omar felt Bannister could easily be replaced.
Jay..Bannister was traded straight up for Burgos. We got Gotay for Keppinger.
So much more wonderful than you thought!
oh…and can Willie get his a** off the bench and bitch out some of these umps. I am sorry, but our players can’t respect the job this guy does. Glavine got between beltran and the ump last night well before willie did. Show some fire willie, this team looks dead and has looked dead most of the year.
I can’t wait until the rosters expand. Anyone the Mets bring up will be an improvement on the last week… and will give these guys some rest. If Maine, Ollie, and whatever 5th starter we march out there could get it together then the bullpen wouldn’t be relied upon so much.
I hope everyone in the clubhouse isn’t expecting a miracle out of Pedro… although we may need it.
On an unrelated topic, I hope Delgado has snapped out of it with the HR last night. For the last few weeks (actually months) he’s looked lost at the plate! You can actually see him muttering to himself when he falls behind in the count.
Expanded rosters won’t help in the post-season.
JD,
Can’t really agree with you.
Wagner has been great this year. This month he has had his issue, but he is probably tired and needs a break.
Heilman as I have said many times this year is the same as he was last year. The difference is that Sanchez isn’t here to take the pressure off Wagner and Heilman.
Mota seems to be better after our new pitching coach pointed out his problem. Most relievers don’t go 2 anymore as you have pointed out many times this year. His first inning was great. His second not.
Scho is a reliever, no more no less.
Pelfrey – I agree with you here ( I think I was the first to throw that out ). He seems to be ok for a couple of innings and believe he can help here.
If Mr. Smith can fix his problems ( he started getting the ball up and they started hitting it ). He is a nice guy in the pen to get one or two batters and shut the other guys down. We have no one on the team right now who throws like him. He is a nice change of pace.
Last night was the offense. 2 runs against a pitcher with an era of 6 is pitiful. We are supposed to have an american league lineup. The phillies pitching is worse than ours. Tom pitched a great game. This was the offense. Specifically the top half of the order.
Dave
Bannister would have helped this year.
Who knows about the trade though. I don’t think Bannister is an Ace. We got Amby because he throws 100 like the boys in Detroit. He has been awful this year and now will be out for possibly 2 years.
The problem in the pen is the same one which has troubled Omar all year: How do you replace the ineffective pitchers in the pen when they’re veterans under guaranteed, multi-year deals? I mean, if you think Willie Collazo offers a better shot than Schoeneweis, what do you do with the remaining two years and $7.5 million of the latter’s contract? What if you cut him and find out you’re wrong about Collazo?
While there have certainly been times when Schmoll, Adkins and Collazo have looked like better options, Omar still has nowhere to park his ineffective veteran relievers. He’s stuck with them.
If there’s a silver lining here it’s that Wagner and Feliciano seem to be experiencing fatigue-like problems in mid-to-late August, rather than mid-to-late September. Omar will pick up a few extra arms on Saturday and, hopefully, will find a way to rest his tired vets along the road to October.
That pretty much sums it up.
Bannister had a 2.89 ERA when he was injured in late April 2006. I don’t know if he would be an ‘ace’ but I’ll take my chances. I think Minaya just fell in love with “tools” of Burgos. When this team has been good (late 60s, mid 80s) it was because of good young talent developed in the farm system.
By the way, just how bad are the Chicago White Sox trailing the Kansas City Royals? They won two years ago and no this..without wholesale firesales like the Marlins or player desertions like the A’s on the 1970s.
And this is why you don’t give steroids users 2-year contracts. Willie has had a problematic bullpen all year yet he’s the one who constantly gets blamed for its deep shortcomings. I realize Omar faces a dilemma about what to do with the contracts but it’s up to him to solve the problem that he himself created. Until and unless he does, the bullpen will continue to have critical problems.
The expanded roster should help this week and hopefully during the postseason. But the problem will rear its ugly head again next year if things aren’t fixed over the winter.
JD, I agree with u on Mota….problem is now this is what the Mets have to live and die with….Let’s just hope they get the next 2 games, things won’t look so bad….A sweep might be the beginning of the end…so let’s root hard tonight, and get the Good Met Karma going!!!!!!
PS – Willie, there is notinh wrong wiht letting a guy pitch into the 8th!!!!
Mota has had a few outings this year with one clean inning, then a fall apart second inning. I don’t see why Willie keeps leaving him in that long. As for Glavine, I don’t think he could’ve made another inning, that was a pretty high pitch count for him. The bullpen blew it yesterday, but they shouldn’t have been in that situation. As an earlier post mentioned, Eaton has an astronomical ERA and they only scored 2 off him and the Phils even more pathetic bullpen. The bats need to wake up.
Can you get Mota a reporting job at the J-N? Anything but pitching for the Mets.
If Goya is oh-boya, Mota is oh-nota.
I stand by the notion that Wagner, Feliciano and Heilman are basically fine and Sosa is serviceable but everyone’s trying too hard because the back-end of the bullpen WILL give it up if called on.
Anybody in AAA who can come up and try to fix this basically should.
Hey John, what about Kyle Farnsworth he cleared waivers and might just need Rick to help him back on course.
Farnsworth? NO thanks no matter who our pitching coach is…sometimes pitchers are just done…and no magic is going to get them back.
As stated above, game was lost because lat nite’s boxscore like this:
reyes 0-5
castillo 0-5
wright 0-4
beltran 0-2
O for 16 leaves a pretty big gap in your offense.
As for the bullpen, it seems that the Met organization is reluctant to move a Zephyr starter to the Met pen. So, anyone in the Zephyr pen worth bringing up? Ivan Maldonado? Willie Collazo? Steve Schmoll?
Can’t be any worse than the current crew.
Anyone know anything about these guys? Stats don’t look too bad on the Zephyr site.
Re Bannister: He’s a nice pitcher, a real thinking man on the mound—but he’s not the “A” prospect that Pelfrey and Humber are. And when you consider that the Mets already had Perez, Maine, Pelfrey and Humber (and, possibly, Mulvey)ahead of him on their depth chart, there really wasn’t any reason to keep him Bannister around. I have a feeling we’d be looking at this deal differently if Burgos were healthy all season.
“Can you get Mota a reporting job at the J-N? Anything but pitching for the Mets.”
Although Mota has limited English skills, he couldn’t be any worse as a writer than Dick Gutwillig.
You’ve been a wonderful audience. Please drive safely.
Omar always says you can never have enough pitching, and I’m assuming he means good quality starting pitching. Therefore, you can never have too much depth on that pitching depth chart. Especially when you end up using the likes of Chan Ho Park, Lawrence, and Dave Williams as spot fill-ins. These spot starters have been mostly bad and have cost the Mets this year. Bannister might have made a difference in 2-3 of those games. I don’t think a reliever with good power but bad command was a good tradeoff for Bannister. A few more good starts by Bannister and he may be a leading ROY candidate.
The Bannister trade was certainly a bad trade if you look at what happened this year. But the trade was certainly made because they wanted to upgrade the pen. Amby has a lot of power. We do not have much. Assuming they could make him harness it this was a good trade at the time even if we were weak in starting pitching.
It didn’t turn out for us, but I cannot criticize the reasoning.
How much power do you need and what good is power if it can’t be controlled? We saw how useless raw velocity can be with Julio and Benitez when the command and/or cojones aren’t there to complement it. If they wanted to upgrade the pen, how about NOT signing Mota (a downgrade) and NOT signing Schoeneweis (a downgrade) and NOT letting Bradford go? Making the pen worse so you can make a trade to make it better but in the process you have to give away a promising young starter is not a very good strategy.
The problem with the trade is Omar thought Peterson was a miracle worker. I think Mota’s steroids-induced performance helped leave that false impression. Omar looked at Mota last year and figured if Peterson could turn him from a 6.21 ERA pitcher into a 1.00 ERA one, he could do something similar with Burgos. Hopefully Omar realizes now that Mota last August was mostly a product of steroids and Peterson can’t work miracles.
Before his injury, Burgos had future closer written all over him, while Bannister, in this organization at least, looked like a fifth starter. You trade a fifth starter for a closer any day of the week.
The real miscalculation here was the thought that Pelfrey would be ready to handle the fifth starter role; had the Mets known he was so far away, they probably would have held onto Bannister for another year.
What I saw written on Burgos was a 5.52 ERA in KC in 2006 with a 4.54 BB9 rate and a 1.64 WHIP. His minor league record was similarly unimpressive. How that translates into a future closer I’ll never know. It takes much more than raw power to become a decent closer. The label “fifth starter” is a little misleading on a team with championship aspirations. Some saw Bannister capable of being a mid-rotation starter. And what I’ve heard and believe in is that you never trade a promising starter for a speculative and wild reliever like Burgos. Never.
This past winter they miscalculated Bannister, Burgos, Pelfrey, Mota and Schoeneweis.
JD,
You said it, pal. And ya can’t blame the offense anymore esp. after that streak of 5+ runs in a zillion straight games … sure one or two (or more) individuals will have off nights at the same time on occasion, but I think the offense is over that persistent-lack-o’-hitting-as-a-team hump. What stands out now is the piss poor bullpen. The SP’s ain’t perfekt but it’s nowhere near as bad as the sustained nosedive the BP has taken. PS Thanks for your ‘Clubhouse Notes’.
...and Pelf can’t make it any worse, am I right? So get his ass in the pen and move some of the dead wood outta here!