Friday night’s Mets-Braves game was suspended after eight innings with the score tied at five. The game will resume at 6:10 Saturday evening, before tomorrow’s scheduled game.

A blurry Freddie Freeman rounds bases after hitting homer off Jeremy Hefner.

The Braves jumped out to an early lead in the first. Jeremy Hefner walked Justin Upton and Freddie Freeman hit a monster shot into the Pepsi Porch to give the Braves a 2-0 lead.

The Mets got one of the runs back in the bottom of the inning. Daniel Murphy was hit by a pitch and David Wright singled to move Murphy to third. Lucas Duda hit a bloop down the left field line that no one could reach, scoring Murphy to make it 2-1.

John Buck led off the fourth inning with a solo home run to tie the game at two. It was Buck’s 12th homer of the season and just his second in May. He had nine long balls in April.

The Mets took the lead in the fifth. A Murphy double and a Duda walk put runners on first and second, and with two outs Marlon Byrd singled to center to make it a 3-2 game.

Hefner made it through six innings, settling down after his first inning problems. He allowed the two runs on just three hits, walking two and striking out seven.

LaTroy Hawkins relieved Hefner, and the first batter he faced, Dan Uggla, homered to left to tie the score at three.

Scott Rice came on for the eighth, making his MLB leading 28th appearance. He allowed a walk and a single and gave way to Glen Burke with two outs. Burke walked Uggla to load the bases, and then Evan Gattis singled to center to plate two to give the Braves the lead, 5-3. There was a reason Burke was sent down to the minors after starting the season with the team.

Speaking of the minors, Ike Davis struck out four times. He’ll be headed to Vegas by the end of the weekend.

The Mets had Ruben Tejada on first and John Buck on second with two outs in the eighth. The red hot Murphy came through with his third hit on the night to score Buck to make it 5-4. B.J. Upton bobbled the ball in center, allowing Tejada to advance to third. That was a huge error because on the next pitch a pitch in the dirt got by Brian McCann. Tejada raced down the line and was safe with the tying run on the wild pitch.

It was pouring rain throughout most of the bottom of the eighth, but the umpires refused to stop the game even though they probably should have. They finally called a halt after the inning was over with the game tied at five. If the Mets had not tied the score, it would have been a loss. Now they have a chance to win (or lose) two games on Saturday.

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Aside from the overall lousiness of the Mets, the hot topic in Flushing is whether Ike Davis should be sent down to the minors. That dominated my weekly segment on “The Phil Naessens Show.” Just who would replace him, anyway?

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While his teammates were parading down the Canyon of Heroes celebrating their 1986 World Series victory, Dwight Gooden was holed up in his apartment watching the proceedings on television, too high to attend after partying all night and doing large amounts of cocaine in a housing project on Long Island. This low moment — Gooden describes it as “missing what should have been the greatest morning of my life” —  in the life of the man who could have been the greatest pitcher of all time begins his new book, “Doc: A Memoir,” which goes on sale on June 4.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable book; well, maybe “enjoyable” is not the right word. More than anything, the book chronicles his decades-long battle with cocaine. Dwight Gooden pulls no punches — the book jacket calls it a “brutally honest memoir” and that is exactly what it is. From the drugs, prison time, his failings as a father and a phony suicide attempt, Gooden tells his story, along with co-author Ellis Henican,  without sugarcoating anything. It is sometimes difficult to read about the fall of someone whom everybody describes as a great man, but there is redemption at the end; after several failed attempts at rehab, he finally succeeds, thanks to the reality TV show “Celebrity Rehab,” of all things.

Of course, Mets fans will be interested in his stories about his baseball career and his time in Flushing. Gooden does that as well, writing about the veterans who took a 19-year-old rookie under their wings. He said Keith Hernandez  was a mentor, teaching him how to pitch to hitters. Mike Torrez was also a great help when it came to pitching. Rusty Staub gave him lessons on how to act like a major leaguer. And perhaps most importantly, Hubie Brooks showed him how to deal with all of the girls who wanted to be with ballplayers.

The conventional wisdom is that Dwight Gooden threw his career away for cocaine. Reading the book, I don’t think that’s the case. His career spiral had more to do with overuse and injury than drugs. It should be noted that Gooden does not say this — this is my own opinion.

Here are the facts: Gooden started using cocaine after the 1985 season, so he was clean his first two incredible Mets seasons. He was using all through the 1986 season and went 17-6 with a 2.84 ERA and 200 strikeouts — a pretty good year. Gooden says he never, ever pitched while high or used cocaine on days he pitched.

Gooden tested positive for cocaine prior to the 1987 season and missed the first two months while in rehab. Still, he came back to pitch to a 15-7 record with a 3.21 ERA in 25 starts. Gooden says he never used cocaine again until 1994, so the rest of his Mets career was not effected by drugs.

He went 18-9 in 1988, and in 1989 the arm troubles began. He was diagnosed with a small muscle tear in his shoulder and spent two months on the disabled list. This can be traced back not to drugs but to the fact that Gooden averaged 235 innings per season in his first five years. He said his pitch count “was often 130, 140, even 150.”

Dwight Gooden came back to win 19 games in 1990, but his 1991 ended in September when he was diagnosed with a partial rotator cuff tear that required surgery. He pitched full seasons in 1992 and 1993, but he had losing records both seasons and his strikeouts were way down.

So Gooden was beginning to lose steam before 1994, when he hurt his foot kicking a bat rack after famously serving up three home runs to the immortal Tuffy Rhodes on Opening Day in Wrigley. He was placed on the DL, started using cocaine again and was suspended for the rest of the season as well as all of 1995. His Mets career was over.

Dwight Gooden came back in 1996 but was never the same. He says he didn’t use drugs again until he retired after the 2000 season, so cocaine was not to blame. Perhaps missing 1995 was the beginning of the end. That was indeed caused by his cocaine use, so you can make the case that drugs ruined his career. But he was clearly slowing down several years before that, so you could also make the case that injury, not drugs, caused his downfall.

In any case, Dwight Gooden also writes extensively about his relationship with Darryl Strawberry. From the outside it seemed like they were the best of pals, but apparently that was not the case. Gooden writes that Strawberry always seemed jealous that he had to share the spotlight with Gooden, writing:

Before I got there, it was all Darryl, Darryl, Darryl. He was the player everyone was talking about. I’m not sure he liked it when people started saying, “Darryl and Doc.”

Gooden said Strawberry often said nasty things behind his back, culminating in 1992 when Strawberry suggested in his autobiography that Gooden was using cocaine during the 1986 World Series. Gooden denied it and Strawberry apologized, blaming it on his co-author. Strawberry has continued to say false things about Gooden throughout the years, Gooden claims.

Gooden doesn’t throw Strawberry under the bus like Strawberry did to him, but Gooden still seems genuinely upset and hurt by Strawberry’s actions. The topic comes up several times in the book. He said they are cordial when they run into each other, but “at this point, we have no relationship at all.”

I can’t recommend this book more highly. It is sad but also inspiring because through it all, Dwight Gooden remains a decent person, and in the end is able to beat his addiction. Gooden points out it is an ongoing battle, a battle we all hope he continues winning.

The post THE Review: “Doc,” by Dwight Gooden appeared first on Blogging Mets.

Everybody but the most optimistic of Mets fans knew the team would not be very good this season, and thus far, they have lived up (or down) to those low expectations. But are the Mets as bad as we thought they’d be, or are they even worse?

No one thought the Mets outfielders would hit, and don’t worry, they haven’t.

We did expect much more from Ike Davis, and he has been a tremendous disappointment. John Buck has been a pleasant surprise, but after a strong start he has reverted to the average hitter we expected. David Wright and Daniel Murphy are doing what they are supposed to do.

After Johan Santana went down, we expected the starting pitching to struggle, but the struggle has been worse than anticipated. We assumed Jonathon Niese and Dillon Gee would take steps forward; instead, they have gone backwards. We expected something from Shaun Marcum, and we’ve got nothing. The only bright spot, obviously, is Matt Harvey. We thought he’d be good, but not this good.

Nothing was expected of the bullpen, and that’s exactly what we’ve gotten, so expectations were unfortunately met there.

So the Mets are as bad as we thought they’d be, maybe slightly worse. I don’t get why everybody is acting so surprised by their poor performance. I guess it is easy to say they are going to be bad, but we all hoped that somehow we’d be wrong. Now that it is actually happening, it is just painful to watch.

If the unwashed masses knew this was going to happen, then Sandy Alderson and his genius lieutenants had to know, too. Yet they still went into the season with this team. This is absolutely unacceptable and they must be held accountable for this mess, as well as for the lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. Anyone who thinks this team will contend in 2014, as we were promised, is as deluded as Alderson and Co.

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With today’s focus on on-base percentage stronger than at any other time in baseball history, it got me thinking — what exactly is a good OBP? I mean, we know Barry Bonds’s .609 in 2004 was abnormally superb, and Ike Davis’s current .236 is really bad. And we know .400 is very good, but what is the cutoff point? I decided to do some digging.

Ted Williams, career OBP leader at .481.

I figured we needed to compare it to a number with which we are already familiar. I chose batting average, since the two stats are closely related anyway. We know .300 is the gauge — if a player is hitting .300 or above, he is very good. The further he slides down from .300, the worse he is. So I decided to come up with an OBP number that could be the equivalent to a .300 batting average — above that number is very good, and the further a player slides below, the worse he is.

I began by looking at all-time MLB stats. Around 200 players have career batting averages of .300 or better. Then I looked at career on-base percentage. I went down to the 200th ranking, and the number was around .370. Then I looked at last year’s batting statistics. Twenty five players batted .300 or better. And guess what? The 25th ranked OBP was — you guessed it — around .370.

So .370 appears to be the number. That means if a player has a .370 on-base percentage, it is the equivalent of batting .300, so we know he is among the elite. A .400 OBP would be equal to .330, so very good indeed. On the other side of the scale, if a player as a .350 OPB, that is as if he is hitting .280, which is still all right. However, if he has a .300 OPB, it is like hitting .230, which is not very good at all.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with a formula like this. I have no idea how other people figured things, but this is the formula that I will be using to make sense of on-base percentage.

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I don’t know about you, but I want one of these watches! This is an ad from the 1960s for a Mets watch. Only $9.95. Not bad!

The post Photo: Vintage Ad for Mets Watch appeared first on Blogging Mets.

It looked for sure like Matt Harvey would suffer his first loss of 2013, but the Mets bats (!) came back to tie the game to give Harvey a no decision. However the Mets would eventually lose the game to the Reds in a matinee at Citi Field.

Matt Harvey gets no decision against Reds on Wednesday.

The  Mets quickly took a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the first on back-to-back doubles by their first and second hitters, Daniel Murphy and Rick Ankiel. Ankiel advanced to third on a David Wright ground out. But of course Lucas Duda struck out on three pitches, and Marlon Byrd was robbed of an RBI hit on a great catch by Xavier Paul in left field.

With a man on in the third, Joey Votto launched a Harvey offering into the seats in left field to give the Reds a 2-1 lead.

With two outs in the fifth Harvey allowed a double, an intentional walk and a regular walk to load the bases. He was able to escape the jam by inducing Jay Bruce to ground out to second to keep it a 2-1 game.

The Mets tied the game in the bottom of the fifth. Ruben Tejada led off with a double and moved to third on a Harvey sacrfice. Murphy hit a relatively shallow ball to right. Tejada tagged up, testing the strong arm of Bruce. The throw was up the line and Tejada was safe.

In what has to be considered at least a mild surprise in today’s game, Matt Harvey was sent out for the seventh inning after throwing exactly 100 pitches. He got the first out but then allowed two straight singles to put runners on first and second. Brandon Phillips then singled down the third base line to give the Reds a 3-2 lead, and that was all for Harvey. On that play, Phillips was caught up between first and second but Murphy didn’t see it and Phillips was able to scamper back to first. It turned out to be significant because when Scott Rice came on with runners on first and third and got Bruce to hit a slow roller to first, it would have been the third out. Instead, it was only the second out and the runner at third scored to make it 4-2.

So Matt Harvey ended up throwing 116 pitches over 6.1 innings, allowing four runs on nine hits, with six strikeouts and three walks and left as the potential losing pitcher.

But the Mets took care of that in the bottom of the seventh. With Tejada on second and two outs, Murphy came through with a single to cut the lead to 4-3. Murphy had three hits on the game. Ankiel then tripled off the left field wall to score Murphy to tie the game at four and take Harvey off the hook. Ankiel also had three hits (two doubles and a triple) and two RBIs.

The Mets had runners on first and second in the eighth with one out, but John Buck bounced into a double play to end the threat and keep the game tied.

Shin-Soo Choo led off the ninth against Bobby Parnell with a double. He was sacrificed to third. Votto was intentionally walked to face Phillips. That didn’t work because Phillips hit a check-swing bouncer down the first base line that Davis let go by him, apparently thinking it was foul. Instead it was fair and Choo scored to make it a 5-4 game. With runners on second and third Bruce was intentionally walked to load the bases. That didn’t work either as Todd Frazier blooped a broken bat single to center to score two more runs to make it 7-4.

With Murphy on first and two outs in the ninth, Terry Collins pinch hit Juan Lagares for Ankiel because the lefty Aroldis Chapman was on the mound. Odd move since Ankiel was having a great game, but apparently the lefty-righty nonsense is more important to Collins. Lagares struck out to end the game.

Mets lose 7-4 and are swept by the Reds. Matt Harvey’s record remains at  5-0 record with five no decisions and a 1.93 ERA.

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With so many poor players on the Mets, the one thing they can’t afford are bad plays by their good players. A first inning error by David Wright led to the latest Mets loss, against the Reds at Citi Field on Tuesday.

That look says it all: the 1st inning was not a good one for Jonathon Niese and Mets.

Things looked good for Jonathon Niese early in the first. He got the first two outs rather easily, but then things got difficult for him. A walk, a single and another walk loaded the bases. Todd Frazier then hit a sharp grounder to David Wright, but Wright pulled his glove up too quickly and the ball went underneath it. Two runs scored on the error. An infield single loaded the bases again and Niese walked Devin Mesoraco to force home a run. Niese finally struck out opposing pitcher Mike Leake to end the inning, but by that point it was 3-0. Niese threw 48 pitches in the inning.

With two outs in the fourth and Lucas Duda on first, John Buck doubled off the wall in right. Third base coach Tim Teufel held Duda at third; with struggling Ike Davis coming up, it was probably a bad idea. Davis grounded out meekly to first and heard some pretty loud boos as he failed to come through yet again. Davis went 0-3 and is now batting .149.

Niese settled down after that terrible first inning and ended up going six innings. He didn’t allow any more runs (the three runs in the first were unearned). He struck out seven and walked three, giving up five hits.

The anemic Mets bats could not manage anything against Leake; he threw seven shutout innings, allowing just three hits.

The Reds made it 4-0 in the ninth when Mesoraco hit Collin McHugh’s first pitch into the seats in left field.

Mets lose 4-0.

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Sandy Alderson paid a visit to the broadcast booth during Tuesday’s game to discuss the state of the Mets. As usual, he used a lot of words to say very little, and looked and sounded extremely uncomfortable sitting between Ron Darling and Gary Cohen.

The first question was about Ike Davis. Sandy Alderson said it is “concerning” that he is struggling to the start of the season yet again, but Alderson is hoping Davis can turn it around, like he did last year. On whether Davis might be sent to the minors, Alderson said, “Maybe he is better off going to Las Vegas for a period of time but at this point we are going to live with Ike for a little longer.”

Alderson admitted this was always going to be a transition year, but he said it’s been disappointing that “some of players we brought in for the transition are not performing well at this point.” He said the most troubling aspect of the season is that players who were supposed to be the core of the team have taken steps back.

When Cohen asked who were those core players aside from Davis, Sandy Alderson would only say it was a “number of other guys who we hoped would be better.” He refused to name names, but said, “Fans can identify them as well as I can.” An awkward silence followed.

On Zack Wheeler and when we can expect to see him in Flushing, Alderson said, “I’m very hopeful that he can pitch well two or three times and then he can be strongly considered for a promotion.”

Alderson also suggested that we might not see Travis d’Arnaud anytime soon. He pointed out that with d’Arnaud’s current injury and the one that ended his season prematurely last year, “He’s only played 10 or 15 games in the past year… hopefully he’ll be playing (in the minors) by July 1. If he’s healthy he’ll be here sometime this year, but we’ve got to give him some playing time.” Which means they won’t be starting his free agency/arbitration clock, which is all the Mets really care about.

When Cohen thanked him, Sandy Alderson said, “I enjoyed it.” It sure didn’t seem like it.

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A report on Tuesday claims the Mets are considering demoting half of their starting infield as well as arguably their most promising outfielder to the minors.

Artist’s depiction of Sandy Alderson banishing players to minors.

Speculation has been running rampant that Ike Davis could be banished to Las Vegas. It would not be unwarranted; after all, he is batting .152 with four home runs and nine RBIs to go along with 48 strikeouts. Even during his first half struggles last season Davis’s batting average was never this low.

But now the Daily News reports that those pesky “team sources” who apparently don’t like seeing their name in print say the Mets are also considering demoting Ruben Tejada and Jordany Valdespin.

Tejada is hitting just .213. But he does have nine doubles and hey, he has one more RBI than Davis. However his .278 on-base percentage just won’t cut it for someone who is supposed to hit at the top of the lineup and get on base consistently. After a rough start in the field in which he rang up six errors in the first couple of weeks of the season, he has settled down and has become more reliable. Still though, his seven errors are tied for the most of any shortstop in baseball. He had 12 errors all of last season.

Valdespin is hitting just .218 with three home runs and 11 RBIs. His demotion has more to do with his much documented off-the-field immaturity problems than what he is doing between the lines.

I think all three demotions would be a mistake, for the simple reason that the Mets do not have anyone better than Davis, Tejada and Valdespin ready to go in the minors. Anyone they bring up will not likely perform any better.

In Davis’s case, he has shown the ability to break out of his slumps at the major league level; just give him the chance to do it again. It’s not like Davis is getting in the way of the Mets contending for a playoff spot.

Tejada also deserves a chance to work things out.

As for Valdespin, will a trip to the minors really make him more mature? If he didn’t grow up after last season in which he apparently had similar problems, what makes the Mets think he will get any better now? The Mets would be better off just trading him (if there is any market for him at all) and be done with him. Such a move will come back to haunt the Mets because I think Valdespin will be a solid player, but if the Mets brass does not like Valdespin as much as it appears, Sandy Alderson should just end it now.

Actually there are probably around 15 players on the Mets who warrant a demotion. Why pick on just these three guys?

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