Mets Take Home a "W" on Opening Day

Mets fans have been waiting all winter for this day to finally come, and for once, the Mets didn't dissapoint.  In what really was an excellent day for Mets fans, the organization opened the newly designed stadium up, showed off it's history and had Strawberry toss out the opening pitch...Oh yeah, and they won a ball game too.

Today the Mets defeated the Marlins 7-1 (box score) in a game in which the Mets took control early and never let go.  In the first inning David Wright hit his first homer of the season with Luis Castillo on base (reached on a fielders choice) to give the Mets an early 2-0 lead.  Then due to some nice pitching from both Josh Johnson and Johan Santana the game was kept that way until the 6th when Jorge Cantu doubled with two outs to get the Marlins within one.  That was as close they would get, as a bunch of Marlin errors combined with some timely hitting allowed the Mets to enhance their lead in the bottom of the sixth to 6-1.  Bay tripled, and Francouer drove him in with a sacrifice fly.  Then Barajas doubled in a run, immediately followed by a pinch hit single from Pagan, and an RBI groundout from Cora. Then in the 7th Francouer added his second RBI of the game with a double that chased home Matthews Jr. 

This was a great day for the Mets and Johan Santana who saw more run support than he did basically all of last season.  Despite that Santana was still stellar.  He threw 6 innings giving up only one run on four hits while striking out 5 batters.  Not a bad start.

Just a few nice stats to share:

Bay went 2-4 in his Mets debut with a triple and a run scored.  Wright went 1-3 with a homer and 2 RBI.  And Jeff Francouer went 1-2 with 2 RBI, while Barajas went 2-4 with a RBI and a run in his Mets debut.  Also making a nice debut today was Matthews Jr., who fought the elements in center field, and also went 2-3 from the plate with 2 runs scored. 

This was a great day all the way around.  But let's be honest, the Mets issue this season will be the rest of the rotation, and those guys don't start throwing until Wednesday when John Maine and Ricky Nolasco square off for game two of this series.  For now, I hope optimism takes over the fan base, but it's only one game.  161 left to go.