Gamethread CXXIII - Mets at Royals

Imagine for a moment that you’re known for screwing up every single thing possible. The internet has a cute nickname for it and everything. And also you’re two games above .500. Everyone with a record below that might feel pretty stupid, right?

The Mets are the Mets. They seem like they will always be the Mets. They’ve done bizarre thing after bizarre thing for years. And now, suddenly, they sit two games above .500 and only 9 games back of their division leader with a month and a half left to play. The Royals are...not that good and...much further back from their division leader. It seems to me that if you’re out-Metsing the Mets - remember that Dayton Moore said during the off-season that the rebuild was finished - then you really ought to feel bad.

The Royals won last night off of Noah “Thor” Syndergaard. That was pretty impressive. We’ll see if they can pull off the same feat against Jacob deGrom, tonight. As always, anything can happen in baseball but I’m still disinclined to place any money on a Royals victory.

Kansas City will send Jakob Junis to the mound for tonight’s matchup. He’s riding a streak of two straight solid starts and has looked pretty good in five of his last seven games. It’d be cool to see him keep that up. Especially if he could keep it up into and through next year without anymore lengthy stretches of inability to throw strikes. Junis has never faced the Mets before; he is 2-2 with a 3.73 ERA and a 3.41 K/BB ratio against NL opponents according to Baseball Reference, though.

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