I guess it’s possible that Sanchez might be of some interest to a team that’s willing to be patient and see if he can recover his form of 2004-6. He’s only 28 after all. Personally, I’d rather have that be the Mets; I don’t think he’s incapable of recovering, I just think the Mets rushed him back before he was necessarily ready for the workload he’s currently being asked to shoulder.

The bad news is he threw one pitch and hit a batter.
The good news is it was an 89 MPH fastball. At least his velocity was up.

I know the numbers suggest that he pitched well today. And for the most part I think he did pitch well today. For a while it seemed like classic Johan. He got a bunch of strikeouts and 13 of his first 15 outs were either K’s or fly ball outs. The one hit he allowed was a HR. But he also had a lot of deep counts and threw a lot of pitches early.
Then, all of a sudden, he starts giving up line drives and ground balls. In the last 2 plus innings he gave up 2 line drive hits, 1 ground ball hit, and got 4 of 6 outs on ground balls. This is decidedly not classic Johan, but is pretty representative of 2008 Johan.

I was sitting in the Upper Deck behind home and really couldn’t tell if he was pitching down in the zone late in the game. Can anyone that watched offer some insight?

I know it defies traditional pitching logic, but I firmly believe that one of the things that has made Johan less dominant is the number of ground balls he is inducing. Pitches down seem to get fouled off more easily and therefore raise his pitch count. Combine with the poor infield defense Johan seems to be working harder to be achieve good results.