Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Bullpen Makes Santana An Issue

The monkeys don't need to rehash yeserday's devasting loss. What bothers us though is that instead of talking about how Johan Santana came up huge in one of the biggest games of the year, some fans are complaining that he didn't demand to pitch the ninth. What's worse, Jerry Manuel through Santana under the bus saying he would have left Santana in had he pushed harder to stay in. C'mon, Jerry, that was just weak. Take responsibility for your poor decision.

The monkeys and other Mets fans have called out players when they didn't listen to the manager. Milledge kept dancing and celebrating despite Randolph telling him to stop. Fans called Jose Reyes a baby for arguing with Jerry Manuel about staying in a game. Carlos Delgado ignored his manager's request to bunt to third to counteract the shift. Now Santana listens and fans want to kill him for not protesting.

Johan Santana has made 21 starts and given up 2 earned runs or less in 12 of them. He has given up 3 earned runs or less in 17 of them. If Santana did the same thing next year, we could easily be talking about him winning the Cy Young.

Duaner Sanchez has been mostly solid this year, but he failed yesterday. Lefties are batting .153 against Scott Schoenweiss and Feliciano has been struggling so that bullpen choice was questionable. Luis Aguayo made some bad decisions sending runners from third. There is plenty of blame to go around yesterday, but Santana is not among those that should be named.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i agree mr. monkey, jerry should have stepped up and accepted the blame. this pitch count thing is out of control. The stat CG no longer exists. however, this was jerry's first misstep at the wheel and it can be forgiven considering the excellent play.