A day after praising Oliver Perez for having one of the lowest ERAs among the starting five Mets pitchers during Spring Training, the Cardinals teed off on him in today’s loss.
It wasn’t high praise, considering none of the starting rotation has less than a 5.50 ERA. Perez’s ERA ballooned from 5.87 to 8.66 after allowing three home runs and seven total runs to Cardinals batters today.
The good news is he walked only two batters. The bad news is it was in just 2 1/3 innings.
You can check out how the rest of the game went with this roundup. The Mets have fallen to 13-13 in exhibition play.
Nelson Figueroa is slated to start Wednesday against the Marlins in Port St. Lucie. My question is why. It seems like the Mets are already set on their starting five: Johan Santana, Mike Pelfrey, John Maine, Perez and Jon Niese.
Or are they?
Perhaps after Perez’s dreadful start today, they’re thinking maybe they’ll need another fifth starter. If they are leaning that way, then Figueroa makes sense.
However, if management is sticking with the aforementioned starting five, then having Figueroa start tomorrow’s game doesn’t seem to make sense. Let him go pursue his career elsewhere.
2 Comments
The team seems to need every possable starter (from all 8 or 9 of them, with 4 in the pen, who can also start) to stay on the club. Because all four of the starters, or should I say five starters after what Santana did today, be ready to start for the team.
Hopefully the offense will do the right thing. But if they do not fix up this pitching staff, it will be a very bad year.
Can you imagine that the team will hit, not only the long ball, but with a good average and speed with outstanding offense all season long, and play under 500 ball.
That would be like “Wow”!!!
Nelson Figueroa will be pursuing his pitching career in 2010 wearing a New York Mets uniform at Citi Field, not “elsewhere.”