Reese Kaplan -- We're Still Shaking Our Heads about Monday

So every time you think you know what’s going to happen, surprises spring from out of the woodwork that no one saw coming. 

Take Monday’s game against the Blue Jays in Toronto.  Everyone fully expected the start to go to recovering Paul Blackburn for his return to the rotation.  Ummm...not so fast.

Word filtered out that Blackburn was having back trouble so the guy most likely to have been packing to Syracuse to make room for him got the nod instead — Tylor Megill.  We all know his history and his frequent burning rubber trips between Citifield and Syracuse.  I’d opined that we’d seen enough of him and should let him play out his final option-shuttle year upstate.

Well, the mysterious back ailment (and the over 5.10 ERA he’d shown when allegedly healthy) kept Blackburn on the IL and with no other starters chomping at the bit in AAA it was simply easier to endure another assignment from Megill.

Now, be honest, who here would have taken the bet that Megill would throw shutout ball for over 6 innings, including retiring his last 16 in a row with high strikeout totals?  That’s a sucker’s bet if ever I saw one but somehow it’s exactly what happened. 

Then Carlos Mendoza made the seemingly curious move to lift Megill and turn the game over to his lately shutdown bullpen.  Fans and announcers both wondered aloud at the thinking, but on paper you take that stellar Megill start home with you before he implodes in the latter part of the game and let the lately spectacular relief corps do its thing.  

After all, when you look at the numbers provided by Danny Young, Jose Butto and company vs. Megill, the decision making was a little clearer...until it wasn’t.

First, Young allowed baserunners.  Then Butto ran into control and hittability problems.  All of the sudden the Mets instead of being up 1-0 were down 2-1.  That’s not how the script was supposed to play out. 

Of course, no one also envisioned that Ryne Stanek would turn in his best performance of the year for the eighth inning, looking totally unhittable with three up and three fanned.  With a high 4.80 ERA Stanek is now 7-3 in the W/L column.

That seventh win came about rather strangely with hit batsmen, walks, wild pitches and passed balls.  Somehow with only a single hit the Mets generated 2 runs in the top of the eighth to take a 3-2 lead, handing the game over to Edwin Diaz for the 9th.  One of those runs came as newcomer Eddy Alvarez from Boston (with a one day layover in Syracuse) scampered in with one of those runs. 

Diaz was not at his phenomenal best, but after giving up a single hit he ended the game on a very long fly ball to right that Starling Marte snared in front of the fence to end the game on what could have easily been a two run game winning homer. 

So every time you sit here thinking you can make all the right moves and things will turn out as expected, you find out that surprises are simply waiting to happen.  

Congratulations on the surprising start from Megill.  Congratulations on the stellar inning by Stanek.  Congratulations on having things break your way when you’re fighting for October baseball and did so on a day when you inched further ahead of the Braves.