Ugh

What an awful series. The Mets got three excellent starting pitching performances and wasted them with a combination of bad hitting and worse relief pitching. And to top it all off, Endy Chavez pulled his left hamstring and likely won't be back anytime soon.

Tom Glavine, Orlando Hernandez and John Maine combined for twenty innings pitched in this series and allowed just four runs. That makes nine straight quality starts for Met pitchers, adding up to a grand total of three wins. If this keeps up, Glavine's going to have to come back next year for number 300.

In these nine games, the Mets have scored just twenty-five runs, or 2.78 per game. This series was the worst of the last three with just seven runs scored. The Mets have too many good hitters for this to continue for very long and Jose Valentin's return to the lineup should help a little bit. Yet even with so few runs scored, the Mets were ahead on the scoreboard in two of these games and tied in the other when the ball was first handed to a relief pitcher.

Met relievers, who had been largely excellent this season, completely fell apart in this series, allowing ten runs in ten innings. I, of course, blame Scott Schoeneweis. The lefty, whose entire purpose on this team is to retire the tough lefties of the NL East, such as Chase Utley and Ryan Howard, pitched in all three games. He allowed a walk, a single and a double to Utley. He did retire Howard in the first two games, intentionally walking him in game three. Schoeneweis now has an ERA of 7.17 with 20 hits, 19 walks and 9 strikeouts in 21.1 innings. That is the same number of innings Jorge Julio pitched for the Mets in 2006 and Julio's 5.06 ERA seems downright adequate in comparison. Three-year contract or not, Schoeneweis needs to not be on this team anymore.

To be fair, the Big Scho was not the only reliever who failed to live up to the job title in this series. The game one loss was the result of Pedro Feliciano and Joe Smith combining to give up four hits and two runs in one inning. Game two saw Aaron Heilman turn a 2-0 seventh inning lead into a loss like he was pitching to a whole team of Yadier Molinas. And game three wouldn't have even gotten to Chase Utley's personal batting practice pitcher had Billy Wagner not blown his first save of the season by allowing a home run to noted pain in the ass Pat Burrell. At this point, the Mets spending four of their first six draft picks on college relievers almost makes sense.

The Mets (35-23) still hold a comfortable 3.5 game division lead thanks to the Braves losing three in a row and the Phillies having been eight games out in the first place. But the schedule gets rather torturous now as their next five series are against the four 2006 American League playoff teams and a very good Dodger team. Meanwhile, the Phillies get to play the Royals three times this weekend, but I digress. The Mets' punishment for being good last year starts this weekend with an interleague battle for DTFT bragging rights in Detroit. Jorge Sosa (5-1, 3.22), Oliver Perez (6-4, 2.80) and Glavine (5-3, 3.36) will get the starts for the Mets against Chad Durbin (5-1, 4.75), Jeremy Bonderman (5-0, 3.27) and Andrew Miller (1-0, 0.00) of the Tigers (33-25). Hopefully the Mets will make it to town with enough healthy hitters to field a DH.