Mets continue mastery of Phillies

BEFORE LAST night's game with the Mets, Phillies manager Pete Mackanin was asked what he anticipated from his newly acquired starting pitcher, Jerad Eickhoff, making only his second major league start after coming over in the Cole Hamels trade.

"I'd like to see the same thing he did in Miami," said the manager. "Pound the strike zone, use all his pitches, throw all his pitches for strikes, keep the ball down. Today we're going to find out if he can repeat that.

"Everybody has bad starts. Hopefully he won't have a bad start until the middle of next year."

The Phillies play a lot of games on hope these days.

They hope their rookie pitcher repeats the consistency of a veteran. They hope someone in the lineup - anyone, really - hits the ball hard. They hope their balkish bullpen has an "on" night.

And they hope their players catch the ball.

Last night's first batter, veteran Mets centerfielder Curtis Granderson, got ahead of the count on the 25-year-old Eickhoff and drove a ball into the deepest part of Citizens Bank Park. There, on the edge of the warning track, Rule 5 centerfielder Odubel Herrera ran it down, but the ball popped from his glove and a seemingly startled Granderson cruised into second.

An infield single, a couple sharp singles sandwiched around another bleeder, and the Phillies had those familiar New York blues again, down three runs to a team that has flipped the tables from tortured to torturer over the last two seasons, and particularly during this one.

"Being the first start at home, I think there were jitters," Eickhoff said. "I was getting those out of the way that first inning."

Still, Eickhoff gutted out six innings, leaving after surrendering a fourth run in the sixth. He wasn't awful, and his string of 16 straight batters retired offered hope - that word again - for that much-discussed rotation of the future.

Eickhoff threw 97 pitches, 64 for strikes. He was at 40 pitches after the first inning. "Obviously he wasn't that same guy in that first inning that we saw in Miami," said Mackanin. "But after that first inning he was the same guy that we saw . . . And it was nice to see him battle back like that . . . That's more important than anything else. As poorly as he located his pitches that first inning, he just turned it around and located extremely well the rest of the way."

The Mets' 9-4 victory at Citizens Bank Park, fueled by that first inning and later two Freddy Galvis errors, was their 11th victory in 12 games against the Phillies this season and their 13th in the 16 games the teams have played here over the last two seasons. They are averaging almost 11 runs per game in their three victories here this week, and their backers - a healthy portion of the 22,184 in attendance last night - have already shattered the single-game and single-season Citizens Bank Park record for annoying chants by an opponent's fans.

New York even sprinkled in a taint of improbability, getting seven shutout innings from Bartolo Colon, who was 1-7 with a 5.54 earned run average in his previous 11 starts.

The Mets, who have hit more home runs than any team in baseball since July 26, only went yard once in this game. But they sprayed the ball so well that by game's end the Phillies outfielders had done more chasing than last season's Eagles' secondary.

Pete Mackanin said last night that, "There's a real good chance" Maikel Franco, out with a fractured left wrist, will return to action this season. That's an upgrade from "outside chance." Franco has taken some infield ground balls over the last two days but has yet to swing off a tee or against live pitching. The team has issued no timetable yet for his return, only that he will. As for the thought that Franco might be better served taking the rest of the season off, Mackanin said, "I don't see the point of that. Why? If he's 100 percent healthy, let him play. Get as many at-bats here as he can. We're going to be playing teams who are going for something in the last month of the season. It's good to be playing games like this, where there's pressure on" . . . Larry Bowa has not heard from Major League Baseball following his ejection from Tuesday night's game, but he expects "a nice letter" from his former skipper, Joe Torre, now MLB's chief baseball officer.

What will it say, Bowa was asked?

"Dear Larry, I miss you," said the Phillies bench coach.