Can David Wright step up his home run total? (PHOTO BY ICON SMI)

BY FRANK GRAY
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

David Wright has two Gold Glove awards. He has all star appearances. He even has the ‘captain’ status on a major sports franchise in New York. He seemingly has everything. That everything includes a power outage in his teams’ new ballpark. We’ve all been through this, I know, but the numbers don’t lie. Allow me to briefly visit this topic in light of a recent interview David Wright has given. Since he broke into the league in 2004, he has not had a full season of less than 26 home runs or 100 RBI’s until last year. He had a career high in season strikeouts with 140 and career low in season hits with 164.

This could just be one bad year. Let’s hope so, after all every major player has a bad year or two. We don’t have to look too far for an example of this. For all of the slack that Carlos Beltran has had recently, he has been a very productive player, not only for the Mets, but in his career. Beltran has had only three full seasons of less than 20 home runs. Two of them occurred while injured, one of which was last year. The other was directly after signing a major contract and having to adjust to the media jungle that is New York. He bounced back to have a monster year after that.
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Did Gary Sheffield get the respect he deserved? (PHOTO BY ICON SMI)

Gary Sheffield made a positive impact on the 2009 New York Mets even though the season ended in an extremely disappointing way, but most likely Sheffield has played his last game as a New York Met.

When Sheffield was brought to the Mets in April, due mainly to the recruitment efforts of David Wright, there was a huge buzz about it because of Sheffield’s bad boy reputation from his days in Detroit and New York as a Yankee.

With the barrage of injuries to the star players, Sheffield stepped up and played the game as a true professional on and off the field, he was a model citizen and many fans did admit that they were wrong about the perceived negative impact he would have on the Mets.
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What does this and the Mets have in common? They both Suck!!!!!

BY ZACHARY SCHULMAN
STACHE WRITER

For all the problems that have afflicted the Mets this year, I attribute it to one thing: the losing culture of this team. It doesn’t shock me in the least that this team has quit. It doesn’t shock me that we just got swept by the Nats, the Nats have had better players on the field than us for almost 4 months now and certainly have a brighter future.

When everyone talks about how Mike Pelfrey took a step back , it makes me scratch my head. If the Mets were whole this season Pelfrey would have 15 or 17 wins and be 10 games over .500 right now. But since the whole team is hurt and the healthy players have thrown in the towel, would do you expect.
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Jerry needs to start resting David Wright More. (Courtesy of the NY Daily News)

BY WENDY ADAIR
STACHE WRITER

The Mets season is fading fast with many of their key players on the DL, but the one constant in the daily lineup is David Wright and Jerry Manuel seems to have a very interesting and alarming attitude towards Wright’s role on this team.

Granted, Manuel is the manager and what he says goes, but listening to him this afternoon on WFAN talking to Mike Francesca about Wright, I was shocked. Say what you will about everyone else, but stating that this whole thing is a learning experience is ridiculous. It can even be construed that this season and its turn of events was meant to happen to make Wright stronger and tougher.

Francesca asked him how he is keeping Wright going during this time as its clear that he is suffering and Manuel replied that yes he is not having fun right now but this experience will make him stronger as a leader and will be a better and experienced leader because of it, which may be true, but now is not the time for such proclamations.

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Omar needs to hit a Home Run at the Trade Deadline

BY MATTHEW FALKENBURY
ASSISTANT EDITOR

As July 31st gets closer and closer, the questions surrounding what exactly will Omar Minaya do come the Trade Deadline become louder and louder. With Beltran, Reyes, and Delgado still out for at least a few more weeks, the fans, including yours truly are wondering just what is the plan for this team.

If they are going to sell, what exactly can they get back in return? That answer is actually quite simple, don’t worry about it cause Freddy and Friends wont sell with a new ballpark in its Rookie Season.

Of coursethey could always stand pat and just wait out the injuries, which isn’t too bad an idea. Then again, if your like me, I have a hard time thinking that Beltran, Reyes and Delgado will come back and start hitting the cover off the ball. I have this odd reasoning that states that players coming back from injury need to readjust to Major League pitching, odd right?.

Then their is door number three, which is that Omar goes out and makes either a big move or a few small moves to try to keep the team afloat until the three musketeers or is it muscle-tears come back from their stints on the DL. With that I wanted to present to you the Top 5 players the Mets and Omar should look into acquiring at or before the Deadline to help keep our season alive.

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Omir Santos' home run off Jonathan Papelbon was the biggest hit for the Mets thus far in 2009.

BY GREG BARRA
STACHE WRITER

The Mets had gone more than a week without a home run and the last two have been by the same player, Gary Sheffield. I find this very odd because, granted they played in a pitchers ball parks in San Francisco and Los Angeles but you would figure someone would get lucky and hit one out. Especially odd in Los Angeles where the fences in left and right field are about three feet high.

Someone could hit a frozen rope to either part of the park and have themselves a homer. This is where I feel the Mets miss Delgado the most. We have been used to seeing Carlos taking many a pitcher yard and when the Mets lost him for 10 weeks no one has stepped up to fill that void.

Gary Sheffield is doing an alright job filling in for the All-Star first base men with key hits in the meltdown game against the Dodgers and last night in Boston. He’s only hitting .257 with 3 home runs and 9 RBI, which isn’t the same kind of production as Delgado. I’m also surprised that David Wright hasn’t gotten a hold of some more home runs in the early going. He’s currently hitting the cover off the ball but isn’t knocking it out of the park but that will come in time.

Tonight’s game against the Red Sox is very important because a win tonight would be a mark of a good road trip. Even if they were swept by the Dodgers, taking 2 out of 3 from the Red Sox would be impressive and I think Pelfrey can help make that happen tonight.

BY GREG BARRA
STACHE WRITER

Going into the month of May, the New York Mets were still trying to find themselves. They were 9 -12 and it looked as if the starting pitching wasn’t going to shape up. Well, they’ve shaped up big time. Since May 1st, which is has been 12 games, no Met pitcher has given up more than 3 earned runs on any start. The Mets are 9-2 during these 12 games and have improved their record to 18-14.

One of the reasons why the New York Mets have improved their record is because of the improvement of Mike Pelfrey. After his horrible performance against the Sad Diego Padres, which he let up 8 earn runs, Pelfrey has allowed 3 or less earned runs in his last 4 starts. Also in his last two starts Mr. Wichita State has gone 7 innings and only walked one batter in each of those games.

Also, the Mets have gotten tremendous hitting from Carlos Beltran, David Wright, Luis Castillo and have gotten help from Alex Cora, and Fernando Tatis on the bench. Luis Castillo has slowed down a bit but he has been a pleasant surprise so far this season. David Wright seems to finally be getting it right at the plate and he is currently hitting .317. Beltran has been nothing but spectacular thus far this season. He kept his bat on his shoulder to end the game tonight but it actually ended in a Met win this time. Beltran already has 46 hits on this young season. Great bench play from Cora and Tatis has also contrubited to the Mets hot streak in early May.

Tomorrow’s game is extremely important I feel because they need to take as many games from division rivals as possible.

Wright is quickly becoming the face of the franchise.

BY MICHAEL GANCI
EDITOR

David Wright is quickly becoming the face of the franchise in New York, and why not? He is built for the job. He is handsome, says the right thing all the time and he shows by example on the field, much like the guy across the river in Yankee Stadium does. Wright also hits around .300 every year and is good for his 25 homers, 100 RBI and 40 doubles, which makes him a very dangerous hitter. With two consecutive gold gloves to add to that resume, one would be surprised to have the fans asking for even more, but that is exactly what I am here to do. David needs to cut down on the strikeouts, which is a problem for David that doesn’t seem to be going away.

Initially, Wright seemed to be one of those players that wouldn’t strike out much at all. Gary Cohen used to say it perfectly. With two strikes, the at-bat would just begin. But that isn’t the case anymore. Wright is now known to lunge at pitches out of the strike zone, and he even gets caught looking more times than I would like to admit. Over the past couple of years, Wright has become very pull-happy, which has led to him being vulnerable away, and pitchers have picked up on that.

Wright is currently hitting .323, which is a good number at this point in the season, but the strikeout numbers are quite eye-popping. In just 31 at-bats, Wright has already struck out 11 times, two of which came last night. He should be a guy that strikes out around 75 times maximum in a season, but he is already more than 10 percent there.

In laymans terms, if Wright batted 600 times in 2009, he is on pace for about 212 strikeouts, which is something the Mets do not want to see. The scary thing is that Wright is still a positive impact on this team. Could you imagine how valuable he will become if he can work out the strikeout problem? He could potentially become a top two or three player in all of baseball.

Come on David. We all know you can do it.

Beltran's big RBI single got things going.

BY: GREG BARRA
STACHE WRITER

It wasn’t pretty how the Mets scored most of their runs tonight but hey, it got them the big W. We saw the Mr. Hyde in Oliver Perez tonight which was nice to see after his first Dr. Jackal performance against the Reds. We also saw Gary Sheffield get his first start in right field for Ryan Church and Gary wasn’t that sharp at the plate but he looked decent in the field.

However, there is one thing that is really bothering me early in this 2009 season. It’s the amount of strikeouts that David Wright has thus far. He went down twice tonight on strikes and that’s 11 strikeouts in only 8 games. It’s a bit worry some to watch your best hitter go down on strikes that many times. Even with all these punch outs Wright is still hitting .323 with 1 homer and 4 rbi’s.

Another thing that is really getting under my skin is the amount of double plays Brian Schneider has hit into. It seems as if every time he’s up with a man on, you can count on a double play. It’s like clockwork. These things will clear up (I hope) but for now it’s a nice win and boy do I love hearing Takin’ Care of Business once again.

Oh, and for everyone who was wondering the Mets are now a half game back of those fighting Phils.