Good pitching + Good Hitting +Good Fielding = a Winning Team. Any other combination results in a mediocre or poor baseball team. Take the Mets for instance. The Mets just completed a 4 game series with the Western Division last place Padres and did not win one game. Putting aside the embarrassment, this is a bad sign. In each of the 4 games, one aspect of the game thwarted the efforts of the others.

The Mets lost the first three games by a score of 2-1. The optimist would say the Mets pitching did a fine job in limiting the Padres to 2 runs in those games. However, the pessimist would win the argument because the Mets hitters could not muster more than 1 run. You cannot even argue that the Padre pitchers were phenomenal. They weren’t. The Mets squandered many opportunities to score runs. In a couple of cases with the bases loaded the Mets only were able to score a single run.

By contrast the Mets bats woke up yesterday and managed to score 6 runs. But the pitching and to some degree the defense faltered allowing 8 runs. The Mets outfielders yesterday made some fine defensive plays including two spectacular catches from Endy Chavez and Damion Easley who is not an outfielder by trade. In the bottom of the eighth, Jose Reyes spun in all different directions before he missed catching a popup in shallow left field. The play resulted in a double which then allowed the floodgates opened.

More than the inconstancy of play, the inability to pitch, field, and hit well all in the same game, the most puzzling aspect of the Mets play this season has been the inability to pick each other up. Let’s place yesterday’s game into the 2006 season for a moment. With a 6-4 lead in the eighth inning, Jose Reyes twists and turns trying to catch a pop-up in short left. He misses the ball allowing the Padres runner to reach second safely. Sanchez then gets the next three batters and the threat is over. This season, the actual result we saw yesterday has become the norm. I don’t have any stats in front of me but how many times this season have we seen a single miss-cue turn into a rally for the opposing team. Good teams do make mistakes, mental and physical. It’s how the team picks each other up and recover from those errors that determine whether the team will be champs or chumps.

In 2006, when the Mets made errors, you always felt confident they would work out of the crises. Most of the time, they did. For the better part of last season and all of this season, that simply has not been the case. As soon as something goes wrong be it a booted grounder or a bloop that falls in, inevitably it seems the Mets fall apart. Is it a mental thing? I think it has to be. These players have talent but somewhere along, this team lost its confidence, their swagger. We thought it may have come back on the last home stand but apparently not.

Many critics have said recently that the Mets are better than this. Obviously they are not. After a year of playing this see-saw style baseball how can that argument be made? The Mets are a 140 million dollar .500 team. And because of that the Wilpons have every right to make any changes they want. If they want to fire Willie and Omar, it’s their prerogative. It’s the Wilpons investment made on recommendations and decisions from the general manager and manager. For a team with the largest salary in the National League, their performance is unacceptable.

On the other hand, making changes won’t necessarily solve the problem. That ultimately must come from players on the field. The loss of Ryan Church has definitely hurt the Mets offensively and defensively. Who knows how long he will be out? The fact he is seeing a neurologist today does not bode well for a return to play anytime soon. Moises Alou is slated to come off the DL but this has become somewhat of a joke. How many games does Moises play before the next injury? Castillo looks like he is going to fall apart in a stiff breeze. Delgado has started to hit somewhat but his defense has been anything but good.

You look at the Phillies right now and see how well they are playing (just swept the Braves) and you begin to think that this is not going to be the Mets season after all. Yes it’s still early but how long do we keep deluding ourselves? With the dynamite play so far of the Cubs and Cardinals, even the wild card seems light years away. The frustrating thing is that it should have been the Mets that won two consecutive division crowns. Now it looks as if that distinction will fall to Philadelphia. If the Mets had won the division last season as they should have, maybe we all could have stomached this season’s play a bit more.

Willie Randolph should get the rest of the year to manage this club. However, if nothing changes he most certainly will be gone. Omar will then be on the short leash. Usually a GM gets to make a managerial change or two. But in this case, if a new manager cannot shake this team out of its doldrums, Minaya will be out of here too.

There are still a lot of games to be played and I don’t feel optimistic. But maybe the Mets can be the baseball equivalent of the New York Giants. But for that to happen, things have got to begin changing soon otherwise the only thing Mets fans can look forward to is more mediocre play in a brand spanking new ballpark.