What A Difference Three Days Makes

The Mets certainly righted the ship in a hurry this weekend. I was out at Shea yesterday for the first time this year (job + kids makes it difficult, though I will be there tonight as well). A couple of thoughts:
1. The Mets absolutely ran the A’s off the field with their speed. The place was electrified from Jose Reyes’ game-opening inside-the-park home run. Yes, I know it was scored as a double and a two-base error by Jack Cust in right field, but when a guy circles the bases on a ball that doesn’t leave the yard, it sure feels like an inside-the-park home run, and the Mets could have been forgiven if they’d raised the magic apple. (Cust had the reverse of Travis Buck’s Saturday in right field; where Buck made a game-saving throw to nail Ricky Ledee at the plate but then overran David Wright’s game-winning single in the bottom of 9 rather than take his time to grab the ball and make any kind of throw on the glacial Ramon Castro, Cust botched the throw on Reyes’ ball in the first but then made a fine running catch on David Wright’s drive to the right field line in the 8th after the game was out of reach). Carlos Gomez was everywhere, albeit running with a variety of savvy (dancing off second to guarantee the cutoff of a throw on a sac fly that scored Valentin in the 2d) and recklessness (stealing third with two outs in the same inning). Gomez also beat out an infield single in the 6th that only a handful of players in the game would even have made interesting, and made a leaping catch against the wall in the 5th. Poor Jason Kendall had two passed balls on top of the steal of third, although he did nail Reyes in the 4th.
2. Good signs Valentin’s 3-run homer to break open the game in the 8th; Beltran gradually defrosting, especially Friday night; brilliant pitching all weekend.
3. At the park: I don’t know why, watching on TV, I really haven’t noticed the gigantic Dunkin Donuts cofee in left field, but it really makes left field look like a miniature golf hole…you definitely don’t get the full effect on TV of how much construction is going on at Citifield and how close it is behind the outfield fences…a scary moment: my wife got the baby (now 15 months) off to nap and was sitting at the end of the row, and she then handed her off to me to go get ice cream for the kids. Two minutes later (we were sitting in the loge under an overhang behind home plate), a foul ball slammed right into her now-empty seat. I never even saw it coming, since there was a guy standing up in front of us during the play.