Friday, April 14, 2006

Mets 13 Nationals 4

A great game. Every team needs to have games like this where the entire offense clicks. In the first inning, Beltran, Wright and Floyd all homered, and it just kept going from there.
Carlos Beltran is starting to play like the player we thought we were getting. He's hitting homers, running and driving in key runs. I always thought he should be batting in the third hole and now he is proving that he can be a capable run producer who would be wasted batting second.

Carlos Delgado has been awesome. I still think that the dimensions of Shea Stadium may catch up with him and he'll fall short of 30 homers but he has been great so far, exactly the hitter we needed.

David Wright continues to be the best player in the majors not named Chris Shelton. Isaacs points out that Mr. Wright has not struck out so far this season in 32 at bats.

Cliff Floyd is a very capable 6th hitter and he will provide some great protection for Wright. He had a great season last year and if he stays healthy he is going to play a huge role for this team.

Darren Oliver could be very effective as a lefty reliever for this team this season. Hopefully his emergence will bury Julio a little deeper in the bullpen rotation. He even got a big hit in the game.

Jorge Julio is just plain awful. He has given up runs in all three of his outings (and yes I was rooting for him to give up 3 or 4 instead of just 1). I don't know why Willie didn't leave him in for the 9th though, hopefully he won't need Duaner Sanchez too often this weekend.

Viktor Zambrano pitched ok, or at least he pitched well enough to earn the win. I think it's clear that his problems are all in his head. Things start to go poorly and he gets flustered and loses the strike zone and things get worse. I don't know if they'll ever be able to solve that for him (he's already 30 years old). But if he can give us that old "quality start" every fifth day this offense should be good enough to get him a good amount of wins.

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