Meet the Mets...

...the Boston Mets, that is.

Believe it or not, the Mets are actually closer to a wild card spot right now than the Boston Red Sox.

After their latest shellacking of the Pirates this afternoon, the Mets—who still don't have a winning record—are only 4 games out of the Bud Selig Memorial Play-In Wild Card game.

Boston, by contrast, is 6 out going into tonight's action—and needs to beat out much better teams than the Mets do, basically two-out-of-the-three who are Tampa Bay, Cleveland, and Oakland.

The Red Sox are, somehow, an impossible 15 GAMES behind us in the AILC (All-Important Loss Column).

Hey, I admit I was the first to panic after last weekend's Beantown Beatdown.  I have never seen a team look so dominant at the plate as the Sox looked—or a Yankees team look so helpless.

I had never seen that because...it had never happened.  As noted last week, no starters have performed as badly in a week's worth of starts as the Yankees' did since at least 1920—and probably ever.

No team has ever run up as many as the 122 total bases in a four-game series that the Sox managed, save for the Yanks in one, 1936 set.

(I found the games:  May 22-25, in Shibe Park.  Yanks take the Athletics who, like about half the AL then, had apparently signed a non-compete clause.  It went 12-6, 15-1, and 25-2 in the first three.  They lost the last one, 10-7, with Twinkletoes Selkirk lining into a double-play in the 9th with two on to end it.  128 total bases, or 32 a game.   Good times.)

How everything has been reversed completely since last weekend—while the Yanks continued to sustain devastating injuries that would have undone a lesser team—I have no rational idea.

Did Larry Rothschild actually help people make "adjustments"?   I would say it is an obvious case of sign-stealing at home...save that the Sox lost their last 4 straight in Fenway, and now have a losing record there.

They seemed to not only have a bad couple of days but entirely lose their composure, coming apart after a bad but routine called third strike against Martinez in the first inning of yesterday's first game.  Weird.

I think the only possible explanation is the JuJu Intervention, which I had thought would be futile.  O me of little faith.  I only hesitate to think of what bargain El Duque must have made with the forces of darkness to bring this off.

All I can say is thank you, Peerless Leader.  We will visit you in hell.

And meanwhile, the Sox are now in real trouble.  Where I had expected them to blow past us like we were standing still, they now have serious problems.

Boston still has 49 games left.  Their schedule is not terribly hard, but it's not made up completely of molly-coddles, dishrags, and knackered horses, either.

Going 30-19—a robust, over-.600 pace—will only get them to 89 wins, probably NOT enough to qualify for a Play-in spot.

35-14—over .700 ball—will get them to 94 wins...still, quite possibly not enough.

The Sox are in real trouble, all of a sudden.  If they don't make it, that eliminates one, truly superior starting staff from the playoff mix.  Leaving "only" Houston...