Quinton Fesq
The NY Mets fell to the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-3 in extra innings Sunday at Citi Field, dropping the series finale and sliding to 2-1 on the season after an afternoon that came down less to what Pittsburgh did and more to what New York refused to do — put the ball in play.
Sixteen strikeouts against a Pirates staff that carried a 4.50 ERA into the game is the number that defines this one, and it was apparent from the opening frame. Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, and Bo Bichette went down on strikes in order to close the first inning, and then did it again in the third. Carmen Mlodzinski walked 2 batters in the first inning and needed 37 pitches just to get through 2 frames, and the Mets still managed to make him look comfortable. What should have been a short afternoon for Pittsburgh’s starter turned into 5 innings because New York’s lineup kept handing him outs.
Nolan McLean gave the Mets every reason to win. The rookie worked 5 innings, struck out 8, and held Pittsburgh to 4 hits — Brandon Lowe’s solo homer in the third was the only real crooked number against him. McLean kept himself in difficult counts and found his way out of them, and he left with a 3.60 ERA through 2 starts looking every bit like the real thing. The offense gave him a tie game and not much else.
The Mets tied it twice without ever leading once. Marcus Semien‘s sacrifice fly in the second scored Luis Robert Jr. to make it 1-1, and a Lindor triple followed by a Soto RBI single in the fifth brought it back to 2-2. Both times New York answered, and both times the lineup immediately went cold.
However, Robert reached base 3 times and Brett Baty went 2-for-4, but the middle of the order — Soto, Bichette, and Jorge Polanco combining for 8 strikeouts between them — could not deliver anything with runners in scoring position when the game was on the line. The seventh inning was the most glaring example: Lindor and Soto reached on singles, a wild pitch moved both runners up, and the inning ended on back-to-back strikeouts from Soto and Bichette with the go-ahead run 90 feet away.
Richard Lovelady inherited automatic runner Bryan Reynolds at second to open the 10th and could not escape the situation. Ryan O’Hearn singled Reynolds home, and after Jared Triolo grounded into a double play, Lovelady walked the next 2 batters to reload the bases and Henry Davis lined a 2-run single to center to push it to 4-2. The Mets scraped one back in the bottom half on Soto’s RBI double, but Lindor was cut down at the plate on the relay throw and Pittsburgh held on from there.
Carson Benge went 0-for-4 in his third career start. Polanco finished 0-for-5. Bichette was 0-for-5 with 3 strikeouts. Seven of the 9 starters punched out at least once, and the Mets leave this series with a lineup that has shown it can score runs in bunches but has yet to demonstrate it can grind through a pitching staff when the free passes stop coming. Sixteen strikeouts in a game the rotation kept them in is not the kind of number that fixes itself without a real adjustment in approach, and three games into the season, that adjustment hasn’t arrived yet.
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