Mets beat Phillies 2 - 1 to spoil Nick Williams’ debut

The Fourth of July weekend started off with a misfire for the Phillies tonight. In New York to face the Mets, they sent Ben Lively to the hill in a mismatch where the Mets offered up Jacob deGrom. The side action on the night was Nick Williams making a debut for the Phillies, ostensibly to fill in for the injured Howie Kendrick, but more likely to give us a distraction from whether this is a 100 loss season or a 110 loss season.

All things considered, it was not as awful as it might have been.

Lively had a truly terrible start, walking 4 in the first two innings. Had he not been bailed out by double plays in successive innings, this game could well have been a blowout. Bob McClure was wearing a path from the dugout to the mound early in the game. And not only was Lively walking dudes, he was missing badly, airmailing a ball to the backstop at one point.

To Lively’s credit, he was...gritty. He hung in there and managed to put up a quality start with stuff that was clearly suboptimal. Overall, after throwing nearly 50 pitches in the first two innings, he managed to stick around for 6.1 innings, giving up 5 hits, 4 walks, 2 runs, and striking out 2. He did settle in after the very shaky first two innings.

On the other side of the ledger, deGrom was deGrom. He struck out 12, walked 1, and gave up 3 hits over seven innings. One of those hits was a triple by Andrew Knapp that was scored as such because Curtis Granderson lost it in the lights. Otherwise, it was a fly ball out. That triple was the first hit of the game, and it led to a score on a Ty Kelly single, plating the Phillies’ only run of the night.

The Mets broke through in the second on a Granderson single. In the fourth, Jose Reyes tripled off the wall on a ball Odubel Herrera nearly got to. Reyes came home on a Travis d’Arnaud single to conclude the scoring for the Mets.

In a season where the Phillies always fail in one aspect of the game, it was the offense tonight. When your pitching holds a team to 2 runs, you should win most of those games. Well, not when you can’t hit. Granted, deGrom is a tough customer and an excellent pitcher who had a no hitter going into the 5th (and should have continued it into the 6th), but they need more than 4 hits to win a game.