With season on line, the good Mets arrive
Mets players celebrate after defeating the San Diego Padres 7-3 in Game 2 of a National League wild-card baseball playoff series, Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022. Credit: AP/John Minchillo
Francisco Lindor, his smiling daughter Kalina on his lap, summed up the Mets’ survival Saturday night in the simplest terms.
Which also happened to be the most accurate description.
“We played very Mets-like,” Lindor said shortly after midnight. “We put the ball in play. We ran the bases right. We play good defense. We pitch. We stay together and we win together.”
Desperation is rarely pretty. And the Mets needed every second of the 4 hours and 13 minutes it took to finally outlast the Padres, 7-3, in Game 2 of the NL Wild Card Series at Citi Field, where a sellout crowd of 42,156 seemed to share in the anxiety of a season teetering on the brink.
But with the Mets staring at a long, cold winter of regret, they leaned on the methods that got them to 101 wins during the regular season, if not the NL East title. Jacob deGrom didn’t provide a vintage deGoat performance, allowing two runs in six innings, but he was still firing 100-mph fastballs in a repertoire that turned more slider-reliant as he hung around to protect a 3-2 lead.
Lindor and Pete Alonso, the team’s co-MVPs, were a combined 6-for-30 (.200) in the four playoff-caliber losses (including last weekend’s sweep by Atlanta) leading up to Saturday night’s elimination Game 2 — and without an extra-base hit between them. But Lindor dented Blake Snell with a 403-foot homer in the first inning to give the Mets a 1-0 lead and Alonso snapped a tie at 2 by leading off the fifth with a monster shot on reliever Nick Martinez’s first pitch.
These were more than just emotional momentum swings. They were lifelines — to the dugout, to deGrom, to a ballpark fraught with October jitters. Just as the Atlanta-induced trauma seemed to stick with the Mets into Friday night’s opener, so did the 7-1 loss that followed, spun by the mastery of the Padres’ Yu Darvish.
That was a lot of baggage to shed, with a very quick turnaround, and it probably doesn’t happen without Lindor and Alonso shattering the tension in such dramatic fashion. Alonso, playing in his first postseason after becoming the first Met to have multiple years of 40 or more homers, called it the biggest home run of his career.
“I think so, yeah,” he said. “Being able to come up clutch in a spot like that to get the lead, I mean, that was awesome. Hopefully I can hit a few more like that [Sunday] and moving forward. So I’m just really happy I was able to help the team.”
For deGrom, it was more of a grind. Talking afterward, the two-time Cy Young Award winner appeared to be more drained than usual after throwing 99 pitches, his second-highest total of the season. This wouldn’t qualify as domination — he struck out eight and had to deal with serious traffic in the fifth — but deGrom was able to keep the Mets alive.
How much longer he will call Flushing home remains to be seen, and he did admit that thought flickered through his head.
“I guess that went into my mind, but the hope was we’d win a baseball game and continue to keep playing,” deGrom said. “The goal was to put us in a position to win or give us a chance and pass it on to [Chris] Bassitt. So our guys did a good job of coming out and putting together good at-bats and getting Blake [Snell] out of there early and putting up some runs late.’’
Ah yes, the late show. Manager Buck Showalter even summoned the trumpets in the seventh inning to unleash Edwin Diaz a bit early in a move that surprised the sellout crowd of 42,156 as it took a few minutes for the fans to find their “Narco” groove.
In 2016, his last playoff appearance with the Orioles, Showalter was universally lambasted for never using star reliever Zack Britton as Baltimore lost the wild-card game to the Blue Jays in 11 innings.
Showalter wasn’t going to make the same mistake again, even if it stretched Diaz to some weird places — including throwing in the indoor batting cages as the Mets staged a four-run rally that took 45 minutes in the bottom of the seventh inning. Diaz returned to throw nine pitches in the eighth inning and had 28 total, so his availability for the do-or-die Game 3 will be interesting.
Even with a 7-2 lead, the Mets were forced to finish this the hard way. Adam Ottavino walked Manny Machado with the bases loaded in the ninth, forcing Showalter to call on Seth Lugo for a second straight day — and likely knocking him out for Sunday. This was a scramble for the Mets, right to the end, and the reward is another game — this time with Bassitt pitching with the season at stake, a pressure that he acknowledged before deGrom rescued the Mets hours later.
“Yeah, anyone that says no is a liar, I’ll tell you that — 100%,” Bassitt said. “I’ve told a lot of guys on the team who haven’t been in the playoffs, listen, whoever can just be themself the most I think has the biggest advantage. The moment is already massive. The adrenaline — you don’t need Red Bulls anymore. You’re good.”
After everything the Mets endured the past week, they consider themselves in a good place right now. With a chance to advance.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
