Mets vs. Cubs recap: Not even close

If the Mets’ goal the rest of the way this season is to put the team in the best position possible in the 2018 amateur draft, it has undone some of the damage it did by winning two series last week rather quickly at Wrigley Field. Coming off a loss on Tuesday night, the Mets lost by a very wide margin on Wednesday in a game that was very briefly close.

The Mets used six pitchers in the game, and all of them took part in allowing runs to score. Ironically, Hansel Robles was the only one of the bunch who wasn’t charged with a run on his own record, though he helped make Matt Harvey’s line look as bad as it did: five runs, all of them earned, in three-and-one-third innings with two strikeouts, four walks, and seven hits. Harvey could have fared worse on his own, but Robles inherited a bases-loaded situation from him in the fourth and proceeded to walk in a run and give up a couple more after that.

If the recurring theme of these games is that the Mets might find out they have some useful players in house heading into next season, this game wasn’t exactly encouraging. Chasen Bradford, who has been pretty good in the majors thus far, gave up four runs in just one inning of work. Kevin McGowan gave up one run in his inning. Jacob Rhame surrendered five runs and recorded only one out, and Jamie Callahan followed that up by giving up two runs in two-thirds of an inning. None of those results preclude those pitchers from future success, of course, but it’d be better to see some of those guys pitch well.

The Mets scored five runs in the game, with Jose Reyes and Dominic Smith each hitting a home run, but in total, the pitchers gave up seventeen.

SB Nation GameThreads

Amazin’ Avenue
Bleed Cubbie Blue

Box scores

ESPN
MLB

Win Probability Added

FanGraphs

What’s WPA?

Big winners: none
Big losers: Matt Reynolds, -17.8% WPA, Matt Harvey, -17.0% WPA, Juan Lagares, -14.7% WPA, Hansel Robles, -14.7% WPA
Teh aw3s0mest play: Jose Reyes leads off the game with a home run, +9.9% WPA
Teh sux0rest play: Willson Contreras singles to score two runs in the fourth, -10.5% WPA
Total pitcher WPA: -37.7% WPA
Total batter WPA: -12.2% WPA
GWRBI!: technically none, run scored on an error