Your Monday morning dose of New York Mets and Major League Baseball news, notes, and links.
Meet the Mets
The Mets defeated the Braves today in their series finale, 4-3. The game ended in the 14th inning when Curtis Granderson brought home Kirk Nieuwenhuis with a sac fly. Before that, David Wright went 4-for-6 at the plate and the bullpen pitched eight scoreless innings to backup a Zack Wheeler's quality start.
Recap Parade: Amazin' Avenue short, long, MLB.com, ESPN New York, The Star-Ledger, New York Post, Daily News
Daisuke Matsuzaka looked great in a long bullpen outing. He struck out five batters and walked just one in three crucial innings. It was the first time since the 2004 Japan Series that Matsuzaka had pitched on consecutive days.
After the game, the Mets announced that Bobby Abreu would be joining the team before tonight's game versus the Cardinals.
The New York Times has a nice story about how Abreu has lost a lot of weight since he last played in the majors two years ago. The veteran has also earned the admiration of his Las Vegas teammates.
Jeff Francoeur pitched a scoreless inning against Las Vegas yesterday!
Around the NL East
The Phillies lost two of three games in Denver this weekend. On Saturday, play was interrupted by a rogue squirrel.
The Mets aren't the only team that won on a walk-off sac fly yesterday. Washington beat St. Louis in similar fashion while earning a split in the four-game series.
Miami earned its first sweep of the season when they beat Seattle three times in a row this weekend. To make matters worse for the Mariners, they had a really long flight back to the northwest after the game.
Around the Majors
The Red Sox held a ceremony at Fenway Park last night to honor the victims and heroes of last year's Boston Marathon bombings. The many banners are reminiscent of a recently revived Mets tradition.
Carlos Gomez flipped his bat on a triple, Pirates pitcher Gerrit Cole got mad, and the result was a full-fledged brawl between Pittsburgh and Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon. The Brew Crew ended up winning the game 3-2 in 14 innings thanks to clutch home runs by Ryan Braun and Khris Davis.
In case you were wondering whose side you should take in the incident, here's Chipper Jones's take. Since we still have two days of Passover left, all that tweet made me think about was hot dog buns.
On Saturday night, Martin Maldonado literally knocked the cover off the ball on a grounder to third.
Yesterday at AA
Jeffrey Paternostro checked up on Dustin Lawley, one of the Mets' older prospects who could find himself on the major league bench in the not-too-distant future.
Jesse Orosco was born on this date in 1957.