The Mets Will Make This as Painful as Possible

Every night the world slows down around the Mets and you can see the disaster happening long before it actually happens, but there is just no way to steer around it.

On Monday night, the Mets again fell behind early and they again rallied late to tie the game only to watch everything go sideways for them once they got to the bonus frames for the second straight game. Teams aren't supposed to lose games 8-3 and 8-2 when they get to extras, but teams also aren't supposed to employ bullpens that destroy everything good in the world.

Tim Byrdak and Pedro Beato were the pitchers who drove the team into a ditch on Monday, although they got a big dose of help from Ruben Tejada. The normally sure-handed shortstop made sure that his name got written into the big book of reasons for the 2012 version of the Mets collapse by failing to catch a ball thrown to him while the Mets tried to turn a double play in the top of the 10th.

Beato loaded the bases from there, leading to Bryce Harper's go-ahead single (Harper also hit a two-run homer and seems like the perfect candidate to become the next generation's Chipper Jones) and, eventually, Michael Morse's soul-crushing home run. It seemed to take the fight out of the Mets, an emotion put into living color by Andres Torres failing to even try to break up a double play in the bottom of the 10th.

That was enough to make it nine losses in 10 post-All Star break games for the Mets and it wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. How can a team keep showing up for work and giving it their all when you can see a horrific train wreck looming on the horizon?

It's a rhetorical question because there's no sane person who would keep showing up to suffer the dual pain of an extra inning loss combined with a blowout loss in the same night. Short of going seat-by-seat (something that should be easy pretty soon) and slapping every fan in the face, it's hard to see how the Mets could be making this thing any more painful.

You could try different approaches, but when not even the appearance of a pregnant Snooki at Citi Field could change the fortunes of the home team it is hard to imagine bringing Manny Acosta back or sending Lucas Duda down will make a whit of difference. Everything is playing out exactly the way you feared it would play out, something that's even worse because, deep down, you knew that the Mets were going to go down in flames this way.