Giants 7
Mets 3
SAN FRANCISCO – If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure you bring your gloves, your bats and your Barry Bonds gameplan.
Or, in the Mets’ case, be sure you forget all three.
The Mets lost to the Giants in really every way imaginable last night. Done in by a rookie pitcher, Noah Lowry. Done in by a Hall of Famer, Bonds. Done in by themselves, defensively.
Indeed, what the 7-3 loss truly showed was how far the Mets are from contenders – the Giants lead the wild-card race, while the Mets are lagging eight lengths behind.
Facing a pitcher making his seventh major-league start, the Mets essentially turned the lefty Lowry into Sandy Koufax. Consider that the man tied his career high for strikeouts – with two outs in the fourth inning. Lowry finished with 10 whiffs, as overall the Mets struck out 14 times and didn’t walk once.
Although Lowry (62/3 IP, 3 ER) doesn’t have overpowering stuff, he was somehow unhittable.
His opposite, Steve Trachsel, didn’t quite have the same success. Trachsel’s shoulder was barking in his last start, and seeing him struggle so much in allowing six runs (four earned) and 10 hits in four innings last night, you had to wonder if he was feeling completely healthy.
Trachsel allowed two homers – Edgardo Alfonzo’s two-run shot in the first inning and the first of Pedro Feliz’s two solo shots in the second. He didn’t get much help defensively, though, as the Mets committed three errors in the first four innings, two of which cost them runs.
In the second, Danny Garcia let Alfonzo’s grounder shoot right through him for a run-scoring error. The next hitter, Bonds, smashed a shot to center that Mike Cameron muffed the pickup on, allowing Alfonzo to score all the way from first. The next inning, Richard Hidalgo completed the trifecta of errors, failing to glove Alfonzo’s foul pop up.
As for Bonds, he reached base three of his four times up. He pulled a line single past two diving Mets in the first inning, drove his shot to center in the second and just missed his 693rd homer in the fourth when he clanged a blast off the base of the right-center field wall, some 420 feet from home.
