Jose Reyes is Better Than You

Detroit 0, NY Mets 5 (box)

The Tigers were shut out for the fifth time this season, the loss tonight dropping their record in games where they score fewer than one run to 0-5. R.A. Dickey, a former first-round pick of the Texas Rangers, held the Tigers without a run for the first eight frames, allowing jut four hits along the way. It has taken better than four years, but Dickey seems to have finally perfected the knuckleball he had only begun to throw when Detroit batters took him deep six times in a game in April of 2006.

His counterpart, Jeremy Bonderman, was very good in his own right, at least until allowing the first two batters of the seventh to reach. Joel Zumaya wasn’t able to escape the jam, and neither was Phil Coke, at least not before three runs had scored in the inning.

The vast majority of the Mets offense came in the form of shortstop Jose Reyes. Reyes lead off the game with a triple, he later added a single and stolen base in the third, scoring the first run of the game. In the fifth, again with two-out and no one aboard, Reyes touched up Bonderman for a second-deck home run. He finished a double shy of the cycle. (…)

Cheers for

• Jose Reyes– We don’t get to see much of him around these parts, but Reyes is showing why the Mets fell apart last season when he was hurt. He’s just really, really good at baseball.
• Jeremy Bonderman– Bondo was out-pitched by Dickey, but he still had a very good effort tonight. His final line shows four earned allowed, but two of those scored after he left the game.

Consider the rest of this post a general jeer for the entire Tigers offense. They weren’t very good at all.