If you eliminate the first inning, tonight would have probably produced a Mets win and a great night for Jon Niese, but nonetheless a hole was dug that was too deep for the Mets to climb out of, as they fell to the Padres 6-1.
The Padres got on Niese right away, using nothing more than a Logan Forsythe double to rally for two runs right out of the gate and put the Mets just far enough behind the eight ball that they’d never recover.
Niese seemed to settle down after the rough first inning, and he threw five more innings, only yielding one more run in the bottom of the fourth. The third run came off a Petco Park triple by Nick Hundley, who was then driven in by a Aaron Cunningham sacrifice fly.
The night ended up going down as a quality start for Niese, but it could have been so much more. Niese gave up ten hits over his six innings of work, but pitched effectively as shown by only having thrown 87 pitches. Had Niese been able to get his pitches over more effectively in the first, he likely would been able to keep the Padres at bay through seven innings of work.
The Padres went on to tally two more runs in the seventh off of Pedro Beato, both of which seemed somewhat irrelevant, as the Mets had seemingly mailed it in by that point knowing they still could win the series tomorrow.
Although Niese could have been better tonight, the loss truly should be marked up to an inept offense. Ruben Tejada doubled to provide the lone Mets run tonight off of Corey Luebke. Along with only scoring one run off of Luebke, the Mets only managed to produce three hits over Luebke’s six innings of work.
Luebke had given up four-plus runs in two out of his last three starts and tonight should not have been any different. It is becoming more and more apparent that this team is beginning to fall into the August free fall which all Mets fans have become accustomed to waiting for.
One other thing definitely worth noting is that Mike Pelfrey came on to pitch the eighth and gave up the sixth run well only throwing ten pitches. Gary and Ron seemed to think that the move was so Pelfrey could test his elbow after taking a ball off of it, but who knows. That most likely is the case, but maybe Terry and Sandy wanted to see Pelfs makeup coming on in the later innings.
The Mets will go square off one more time with the Padres tomorrow when Dillon Gee toes the rubber against Matt Latos. The Mets hitting woes against Luebke probably do not bode well for tomorrow against Latos, but tune in at 6:35 to see if they can get something going and squeak out their first series victory versus the Padres since 2002.
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