Willie Harris, Met Killer

Apparently Willie Harris is pretty good at defense. The former Brave and current Nat, who went Endy Chavez over the center field fence at Shea last season and robbed Carlos Delgado of a potential game-winning homer in the rubber game of a big mid-summer series, was at it again yesterday, laying out on the left field line to rob Ryan Church of what would have been likely been a game-tying bloop double. Harris also contributed a leaping catch Wednesday night and a key sacrifice in the eighth inning of yesterday's game to set up the game's only run and help the Nats take three of four from the Mets, who ended up turning in a 3-4 record on a seven game homestand against two of the National League's three last place teams.

Last season's play against Delgado

So here's to you, Willie Harris. It's always the little guys, who come in late in the game for defense and somehow end up screwing you in the end. I miss Joe McEwing.

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So the Mets waste the best start of Mike Pelfrey's young career, fail to do squat offensively off the Washington Nationals' pitching staff, and lose 1-0. I feel particularly bad for Pelfrey; that's two good starts in a row for big Pelf, and he's got two hard-luck losses to show for it.

In the 8th inning, Jose Reyes tried to go first to third on a bunt, and got thrown out. At least he was hustling - unlike David Wright and Luis Castillo, who dogged it on Wright's fly ball in the third inning and could only many it to first and third, respectively, when Austin Kearns couldn't make the play. There were two outs, so Castillo really should have scored from first, and he probably would have if he had been running hard.

The Mets, after yesterday's debacle, are now 20-19. If we're looking for some silver lining here, starting the season at a .500 clip at least manages to better illuminate this team's shortcomings. We played the exact same way for two-thirds of last season, but the hot start enabled Willie and the rest of the team to sell us that false, "class of the NL" bag of goods. Now, after playing under the same malaise for the first forty games of this season despite the addition of the best pitcher in baseball, there's no escaping the fact that the formerly upstart Mets have become a lazy, stagnant bunch under their ineffectual manager.

The thing is, I don't even know how this happened. I really don't. Willie, quite honestly, did an excellent job with this team in '05, and especially '06. The Mets, in an early warning sign, had a hard time completing sweeps in the beginning of last season, but they still played .600 ball through the end of May. We all knew they were good enough, and how they descended into seemingly inescapable .500 listlessness is as far beyond me as how they managed to blow a 7 game lead with 17 to play after posting a 9-2 record to begin the month of September.

But they are the Mets, and things don't always make sense. They also looked pretty good in those first few games in Florida. I really thought they were back. Think really hard back to the beginning of April. Did you ever think that, six weeks later, the Marlins would be the ones holding a stubborn two game lead in the division?

As the spring ended and the season got off to fast start those first few games, we really thought that Johan Santana had turned the page. But clearly the Mets remain stuck in the mud, wheels spinning but going nowhere, unable to move on to the new day that the acquisition of the stud left-hander was supposed to dawn.

Interviewed on WFAN yesterday morning with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton (great show, by the way), Gary Cohen was asked, generally, what he thought of Willie Randolph's job security. In a statement that I thought was pretty frank for a broadcaster, particularly Cohen, he responded: "They better start winning some games or no one on this team is safe."

The tide is turning, and in 2008 no one within the Mets' organization has been lulled into last year's false sense of security.

Is there change in the air? The first subway series this weekend, between two underachieving New York teams, should be interesting.


(Image courtesy graphics.nytimes.com)