The Mets are really, really good at finding ways to lose. Of all the embarrassing losses my beloved Mets have been through, that one might just take the cake. I stay up until 2:00 in the morning to watch an extra innings, West Coast Mets game 3,000 miles away and this is how i'm rewarded. this was laughable for so many reasons, and ironic because we didn't actually play all that bad for 10 innings. the 11th inning was the single worst inning of baseball I have ever seen by the Mets in a close game. Here's a summary of the Mets day today:

1. It was announced that Carlos Delgado will miss at least 6 weeks, likely 2 months or more with hip surgery. Though not as frustrating as tonights loss, that will probably go down as the most important downer of today in the long run.

2. Jose Reyes' calf is still tweaked and a DL stint is now in the picture.

3. Alex Cora was discovered to have sprained his thumb and is on the 15 day DL, so our starting SS is now one of my least favorite Mets, Ramon Martinez.

4. through the first 7 innings, the mets get 7 hits and a few walks yet have only 1 run to show for it.

5. Fernando Tatis goes 0-4, with all 4 outs recorded w/RISP. He strands 7 baserunners total.

6. Luis Castillo, the best bunter in the game, pops up an easily buntable pitch to the pitcher in the 8th inning, which almost succeeds in losing the game in regulation. looking back, i wish sheffield HADN'T gotten that RBI infeild single because it would have spared us the extra innings abomination.

7. 11th inning, 2 outs, nobody on, and ryan church gets a nice little single. he's 2-2 after having pinch hit, so he's having a nice night. then, on a 1-2 count, Angel Pagan rips a deep hit into right center field for his 4th hit of the night, with 2 outs, a clutch piece of hitting, church comes home to score and pagan coasts into 3rd with a triple. im cheering and happy as the mets have taken the lead and are threatening to add more. then Church is called out at third base................wait, what?...............he scored! it was a triple! wtf?........instant replay shows that by about a half a millimeter, far too small a margin for the ump to clearly see, church missed third base as he ran in from home. he is out. the inning si over, still 2-2. at this point im at my wits end. what else can possibly go wrong, i think? happy you asked, fate replied.

8. stokes walks the leadoff guy on 4 pitches. and that leadoff guy is juan pierre, the fastest non-reyes player alive. brilliant!

9. with no outs and a guy on first, dodgers hit a fly ball into left....and pagan/beltran both call each other off and virtually collide in left as it drops in and rolls to the wall. second and third, no outs, at this point im about ready to just turn off the TV and go to bed in my anger. I wish i had, cuz it was about to get yet worse.

10. after a nice fly out that was too shallow to tag up on and a beautiful throw by pagan to keep pierre at third, stokes battles with hudson for awhile and im beginning to have a glimmer for a double play ball when a curse disguised as a miracle happens: i get one. sharp grounder, right to the first basemen, should be an easy double play ball to keep us alive against all odds! "imagine what a morale booster it would be if we overcame all that adversity and won anyways!" i thought in that instant. "hey, we have castillo leading off followed by beltran and wright, our big bats are on their way, we have a good shot!". then reed's throw to home went so wide it almost went into the Dodgers dugout. fml.

11. As salt in the wound, 4 of the mets 5 crucial errors tonight were committed by the backups of injured players. meaning if we were at full strength, in all likelihood we would have won this game by a good margin and avoided all of this.

11. The end result? the Mets got 6 effective innings from Tim Redding, 5 great innings of patchwork bullpen work, and 11 hits from the offense in a game they would only need 3 runs to score. 5 errors and a missed third base later and the Mets had once again found a way to lose. This is not only reminiscent of last year's hell, this is worse. I have never experienced a more embarrassing, comically, laughably, humiliatingly woeful inning of Mets baseball in my life. We are a better team than the Phillies in my opinion, but I would bet my life that if you asked the current Phillies team to play the Dodgers 10,000 times they would not suffer as unbelievable a collapse as tonights nightmare. Talk about a momentum killer.

As of now, our 2 week rally is officially over. our momentum is officially lost. One frikin day has turned a red-hot, division leading team into an injury riddled, embarrassed, unconfident team clinging to a tie for first place. It is up to Jerry Manuel to keep a straight head and put it all into perspective. This is a turning point in the season for us. We can forget tonight ever happened, meld together as a team, and perform well even in the absence of Delgado, or we can spiral into yet aother season full of injuries, misery, and nightmarish games like tonights.

Sounds like there was a lot about this game I was glad to have missed.  Being stuck in Minnesota with no way to watch anything but ESPN / Fox games, I wind up following the games just on the GameDay thing on mets.com, but it's amazing how from even that you can pick up a sense of whether the team is awake or not.  Somehow staring at that 2-0 deficit right away looked huge, insurmountable, especially after that disgusting display against Cain in SF where we turned every bases loaded, nobody out situation into unlikely double plays and whatever else.

I went to bed maybe around the top of the 11th, but WHY did I just have the feeling--it's 50/50 at that point, a crap shoot, could go either way--that there was simply no way we would push across a run and then pitch a scoreless half inning to get a win?  This is what a good team does.  It takes a few minutes of effort and execution to score one run and then hold them off for a win, but nope, no dice, I don't know what they were doing but it sure sounds like not a hell of a lot.  Is it just me or do we never win extra inning games on the road??

I'm not going to pronounce any hot streak over yet or anything, but the offense had been clicking, even without Delgado so how do we all of a sudden score, what, 2 runs in 21 innings?  This sleepwalking act won't cut it unless Santana's pitching and maybe not even then.

This next stretch of games vs. the Dodgers and Red Sox are going to be a real test for the Mets. I would be very pleased if the Mets went 3 and 2 over the next five games. Delgado is out. Reyes is questionable. Cora is out so we're down the a 3rd string shortstop. The Mets have lost their offensive punch over the last couple of games and the defense has been atrocious. And then we find ourselves on the road playing two very good teams. I didn't stay up for the end of the game but it hurt reading the recaps. We've only lost two games in a row and there's still time to get things right. Some players just need to get their heads out of their behinds. And I think that this is a big test for Jerry Manuel too. With all of these injuries Jerry needs to be very smart in every move that he makes.

I would've been happy with 2 & 3, frankly.  Have we done OK with the Red Sox in interleague over the years?  I'll look it up but I think it's been so-so at best.

Hmmm, somewhere on mlb.com, baseball almanac, or some other good stats site there was a team-by-team all-time won-loss breakdown and for the life of me I can't find it.  People at work were amazed one day when they pressed me and I was able to find the all-time Twins/Padres record....  Anyone know where such a breakdown is?

Last nights game was an absolutely pathetic end to an even more woeful series. It seems impossible that my confidence 4 days ago was so high.it seems impossible that in the first 3 games of our last series we scored 24 runs!, while in these past 3 we've scored 4. Over the past 3 days we've played the most embarrassing baseball game of the season, lost 3 games by 2 runs or less, placed Delgado, Cora, and now Reyes on the DL (since he aggravated his calf injury painfully last night trying to beat out a grounder...perfect), and fallen from first place to a 3rd palce tie. What a dismal 3 games.

We were 0-10 with RISP last night. We lost by 1 run.

This series we got 3 excellent outings from our 3 worst pitchers in the rotation, and somehow found a way to lose all 3.

We have not hit a home run for nearly 70 consecutive innings.

I swear its like we all just massively jinxed the Mets on Saturday night by celebrating their hot streak! I've never seen any team go from so hot and motivated to so cold and disheartened in just 4 days.

The Mets were in some close games in this series but couldn't come through. Injuries and missing players aside the Mets had good opportunities to win these games. They need to forget whatever happened in LA and start fresh this weekend versus Boston. I wish they were coming back to an easier series but those are the breaks. Hopefully Santana can throw a gem tomorrow night and stop this bleeding.