Mets Bring Out the Big Bats, Slug Their Way to Game 4 Win

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The New York Sun

Who can tell anything about baseball?

Through two innings last night the Mets looked sluggish and weak. They flailed at Cardinals starter Anthony Reyes’s changeups. Balls skipped just past the outstretched gloves of Carlos Beltran and David Wright. Coming off the weekend’s devastating losses, in which first Billy Wagner and then Steve Trachsel lived down to fans’ worst suspicions, and in which the vaunted offense bizarrely hammered defending Cy Young winner Chris Carpenter before scoring not a run against the mediocre Jeff Suppan, the Mets looked simply spent — too many injuries to too many important players, too much travel under too much pressure.

Even the third inning brought no relief. Reyes’s rather predictable program of coming in with his fastball before going away with his changeup looked all the more predictable after Beltran and Wright scorched solo home runs off the fastballs, putting the Mets up 2–1. But starter Oliver Perez gave the lead right back in the bottom of the innings, surrendering an RBI triple to Juan Encarnacion.

A word for Perez. His line will not look beautiful to future students of the game. 5 2/3 innings, five runs — it is not an impressive line, and there is no way to make it seem so. But he pitched well, and the Mets can be guardedly optimistic that he will do so again if he’s called upon to pitch in the World Series.

Perez’s problem has always been his wildness, and if that is something the Mets can ever fix, it is not something they were ever going to be able to really and truly fix during the season. If he is more wild than he should be, though, he can make up for it with aggressiveness, and that’s what he did last night, mixing in the occasional off-speed pitch but mainly throwing his electric fastball in the low to mid-90s.When you can and are willing to challenge Albert Pujols with heat and strike him out upstairs, you can get away with a lot. Two of the runs Perez allowed came in garbage time, as he was rightly laying in strikes and gave up home runs for so doing.

Far more important, of course, was the Mets’ brutal display of top-to-bottom hitting in the fifth and sixth innings, only some of which was attributable to the weak St. Louis bullpen.The Mets’ strength is power, but they truly do have a diverse offense, and you saw everything here from Paul Lo Duca reaching on an error in the fifth, to Lo Duca and Reyes executing a perfect hit-and-run in the sixth, to Beltran moving the infield in ever so slightly with a fake bunt attempt before pulling the ball just into shallow right.

That’s not to say that the Mets are (or should pretend to be) a small-ball club. Beltran’s two home runs and Carlos Delgado’s home run and ground-rule double are the sorts of things on which everyone will rightly focus. Power is what wins games, especially for this club. Walks and well-placed singles, though, are what make the difference between a three-run inning and a six-run inning. The diversity of the Mets’ attack is the critical complement to its quality, and much of what’s allowed them to survive this far.

The Mets not only needed this win, they needed to win it the way they did. Darren Oliver’s six-inning stint Saturday, which makes the long reliever unavailable to soak up innings tonight, has put Tom Glavine in an awfully tough bind; a 40-year-old pitcher who goes on preparation, feel, and command rather than stuff is, one would think, just the sort most likely to get hammered when pitching on short rest. At least now Glavine has the confidence of knowing that the rest of the bullpen is in as reasonable shape as it’s going to be, and that he doesn’t absolutely have to go five or six innings.

It will still be tough going. The Cardinals’ array of low-budget hitters has proved surprisingly resilient (So Taguchi and David Eckstein hitting big home runs?), and while Pujols has done nothing, that probably means he’s just marking time until he does. Pitching and defense might be what wins in the postseason generally, but for right now the Mets might just be best off trying to win by bludgeoning.


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