Brandon Nimmo's pair of tying homers power Mets to win over Atlanta
The Mets' Brandon Nimmo celebrates in the dugout after hitting a three-run home run in the fifth inning of a game against Atlanta on Monday in Atlanta. Credit: AP/John Bazemore
ATLANTA — The celestial bodies aligned for the Mets on Monday.
In the first game of their first series against a chief rival, they beat Atlanta, 8-7, despite facing a major pitching and hitting disadvantage entering and throughout the day.
The Mets snuck away with a win after so much went right: Brandon Nimmo broke out with two tying home runs, five RBIs and four hits — one more than he had during the previous week and a half of the season. DJ Stewart’s first hit of the year was a go-ahead homer in the eighth. And a bullpen that lacked its best three arms strung together 6 1⁄3 innings of three-run ball, which was just good enough.
It meant a fourth win in five games for the Mets (4-6). This one was about as stressful and intense as it gets in early April.
“To be honest, I was nervous in here [the clubhouse]. I wasn’t even in the game anymore,” said Reed Garrett, who tossed 2 1⁄3 scoreless innings of relief. “Obviously, it is the second week of the season. But winning is fun. No matter when.”
Stewart said: “Crazy atmosphere. It’s fun. It felt like a postseason atmosphere.”
And Nimmo: “Nice to kind of do what they’ve done to us a few times . . . Those ones hurt.”
The key mound moments came with the once-again-undermanned bullpen clinging to a lead in the eighth and ninth.
The latter: flyouts by Marcell Ozuna (jumping catch by Tyrone Taylor at the leftfield wall) and Travis d’Arnaud (to the warning track in rightfield for the final out) off Jorge Lopez, who yielded a series of rockets.
“Off the bat, you don’t know,” Carlos Mendoza said of d’Arnaud’s drive. “But once Marte is camped, we shake hands.”
An inning earlier, with his 31st pitch, Drew Smith induced a grounder to third by Austin Riley to leave the bases loaded.
Smith’s effort was central to Mendoza’s ragtag team of hurlers surviving. Earlier in the sequence, he chased a foul ball and clotheslined by the camera-well railing near the first-base dugout, banging his right lower leg against a camera. He rebounded to strike out d’Arnaud and Jarred Kelenic and — after walking in a run — retired Riley.
“The adrenaline truly just took over,” Smith said. “It probably looked worse than it really was. Next time maybe I’ll just try to not run into the camera well.”
Knowing he didn’t want to use Edwin Diaz, Adam Ottavino or Brooks Raley, all of whom had pitched three of the previous four days, Mendoza’s pitching approach went like this: Julio Teheran for eight outs, Garrett for seven, Cole Sulser for three, Jake Diekman for three, Smith for three and Lopez for three.
The Mets didn’t have any other pitchers available. “I’m glad the boys came through today offensively,” Mendoza said.
Facing his original team in his Mets debut, Teheran had an ugly line: 2 2⁄3 innings, four runs.
He navigated the first two innings with relative ease before running into trouble in the third. It took him 41 pitches to get two outs and give up all four runs — two on Ozzie Albies’ double, two on Ozuna’s home run.
Atlanta righthander Charlie Morton similarly cruised, then crumbled. The Mets reached him for four runs in 5 2⁄3 innings.
Nimmo’s first blast tied it in the fifth. When Atlanta went ahead again in the bottom of the sixth, Nimmo tied it again in the top of the seventh. He upped his average from .103 to .212 and his OPS from .454 to .819.
“Against a lefty [A.J. Minter], tough left-on-left, for him to go dead-center — that tells you how good of a player, how good of a hitter he is,” Mendoza said. “And we got a lot of them here.”
Nimmo said: “It doesn’t mean I’ve figured it out. It doesn’t mean that the next games are going to be great. You start to learn that as you play more, that every game is a grind and you gotta really respect the team you’re playing against. But it’s nice to come through when it happens.”
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
