I was at the Mets game last night, and what a disappointing loss it was. Mike Pelfrey got very little help from his defense, and with two outs and the pitcher on first in the 6th inning courtesy of a Jose Reyes error, Jerry Manuel decided to bring in Raul Valdes to face the lefty.
In the small sample of this season, Valdes’ opponents OPS vs. Lefties: .995. And vs. Righties: .619. You can argue whether or not Pelfrey should have even been taken out at that point of the game because despite his high pitch count he was finally cruising and, you know, the season is kind of on the line every game they play from here on out. He did throw a lot of pitches but for the sake of Pelfrey and the team, he should have at least gotten one more batter to finish the inning. He induced two pretty easy outs in the air and the aforementioned E6 on a routine ground ball.
Pedro Feliciano, Lefty Extraordinaire, was left sitting in the bullpen. He was used on Wednesday night to face Albert Pujols with the game on the line even though he’s struggled mightily against right handed hitters and shouldn’t really be facing a righty in a close game with anything other than the bases empty – and even that might be too much if it’s a one run game. But if ever there were a situation that cried for Pedro Feliciano, it was in that 6th inning last night. His entire purpose as a baseball player is to get lefties out. He’s great at that. He can make Chase Utley and Ryan Howard look foolish in a tight game, and he probably could have gotten better than HR, Single, Single, HR if he were brought into that spot last night.
On the upside, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in Section 15, Row 14 tonight and took a ton of pictures and have posted some of them here for your enjoyment.
You can view the entire set of photos on my Flickr page.