Time Is Now, Urgent Urgent BlahBlahBlah

I fully expected to return home from yet another four or five day hiatus into the void catching up on all the stories of the Mets having risen to the challenge, the bullpen righting itself, the Phillies squashed and Willie setting up his postseason rotation.

Instead I rub my hands together, turn on the computer and start reading one rotten story after another; Willie can't manage, the rotation is in shreds, the bullpen still sucks, and Reyes continues to be mired in a deep slump.

The Phillies are not only NOT dead but sit on the precipice of knocking the Mets from the top of the NL East with another pair of crap Met performances.

Shall I sit on my hands like Willie and talk about urgency and how the time is now?

Of course this was cute a week ago, like a baby belching, this little swoon was charming in its own silly little way. Sure, the Mets were playing like mugs but the NL East had been a long competition of out-mediocre'ing each other all season long and a few more days of one miserable outing after another wasn't going to suddenly upset that balance.

So whilst we could pseudo-scare ourselves into thinking the NL East was at stake most of us were quietly laughing in the back of our minds thinking to ourselves, sure - it's all been done before: The White Sox a few years back nearly losing it all to the Indians, the Tigers and Cardinals making a mockery of the last several weeks of their regular seasons - this sort of precident was exactly what we were looking for: the reasoning why it was ok the Mets were playing like they sucked.

This was the lull before the storm.

Now?

Bullpen over the last 30 days:

Guillermo Mota 1-2 5.02 ERA
Pedro Feliciano 0-0 4.85 ERA
Jorge Sosa 0-2 6.92 ERA
Scott Schoeneweiss 0-0 5.91 ERA
Aaron Sele 0-1 8.10 ERA
Billy Wagner 0-1 4.82 ERA

You might be happy to see a postseason Mets starting rotation of Glavine, Pedro and El Duque (and Oliver Perez if a series went that far) but you can't escape realising that bar Perez, none of these guys are likely to pitch more than 5 innings and you have to wonder just what the hell will happen to the Mets every night from the 7th inning on....