Give former Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson ten minutes, and while he might struggle to fix Victor Zambrano, he can easily summarize a pretty good reason or two the 2007 Amazins’ surrendered a September advantage to Philadelphia.  Speaking to WFAN’s Ed Randall last weekend, Peterson (currently ensconced as the Brewers’ pitching coach)  did everything but accuse of Omar Minaya of sending him into battle armed with a pea-shooter.  The following soliloquy was transcribed by MetsBlog’s Matthew Cerrone :

“Anyone who thinks we had this major collapse, in 2007, in my opinion, we didn’t have a collapse. … We didn’t have the depth to replace Pedro Martinez and Orlando Hernandez when they went down with injuries. … To all the people listening who are huge Mets fans, do you know who Brian Lawrence is? or who Dave Williams is? Do you know who they are? Brian Lawrence had 7 starts for us in 2007. Dave Williams had 2. Phil Humber had 1. Chan Ho Park had 1. And out of those 11 or 12 starts, we only won 1 game. I mean, those are the guys who replaced El Duque and Pedro. … We didn’t have the depth. In September, Billy Wagner went down with back problems and Aaron Heilman was closing for us and so our number one right-handed pitcher to get a batter out – in September – while Heilman was closing – I’ll ask it as a trivia question – do you know who it was? It was Jorge Sosa. Jorge Sosa was our number one right-hander to get a right-handed hitter out.”