Mets 5 Pirates 0

I had no idea how to do a write-up of "the most well pitched blowout in history," as deemed by Rory in the comments of the game thread below, until I accidentally stumbled upon Paul Alexander and one of the Dopplergangers that works for FSP on Pittsburgh Sports Tonight. I'm now too angry to think about anything else, so bear with me for a minute here. They first concluded that because Kip's fastball was around 92 mph, because he "said he was ahead of schedule a couple months back" and because he pitched so well on those rehab assignments that there's no way anyone should blame the Pirates for rushing him back. They then went on to more or less blame Kip for making himself untradeable and saying that the only way the Bucs could dump him was by "trading him to a rebuilding team looking to put together a new pitching staff." At that point I think my eardrums exploded so I don't know how much further the converstation went. Still, I feel the need to address these points now that I've heard them. Tonight's game was a wonderful example of why Kip was rushed back. In the first inning he couldn't get a handle on anything, threw a ton of balls, walked some guys, backed off to throw strikes, and found himself in a 5-0 hole. In the next five innings he was better than he was at any point last year after mid-June. He gave up no hits and two walks. He didn't try to strike everyone out, in fact he only struck one guy out. Instead he got 10 ground outs and 4 flyouts on only 65 pitches. In his last start he threw a ton of strikes, but didn't have the extra oomph needed to get it past guys, instead the Tigers fouled off a million pitches until Kip had to come to them. In his first two starts, he was also wildly inconsistent, even for Kip Wells. This screams "THEY RUSHED ME BACK AND I CAN'T FIND A RYTHYM! SOMETIMES I GO OUT ON THE MOUND AND IT JUST ISN'T THERE!" but because Kip pitched really well in AA, these guys want people to believe that Kip wasn't rushed back. And of course, for their ideal home for Kip next year, they described Pittsburgh. Maybe I'm wrong and the Mets simply sat back on their laurels after taking a 5 run lead tonight, but it's hard to argue that the last five innings for Kip weren't encouraging. And the fact that it took him 11 and 2/3rds innings to get to that point makes a pretty strong case that he should've made at least one (and maybe two) more rehab starts.

As for the rest of the game, well, it sucked that Kip put us in that huge hole, and that certainly didn't help us, but Kip could've given up a solo homer and put down the next 18 guys in order and things wouldn't have been different. Shutout by El Duque? The guy is 5-8 with an ERA of 5.12 and a WHIP of 1.41. Perhaps more telling is this, in games in which he hasn't faced the Pirates those numbers are 3-8/5.94/1.47. Yipes.

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