Mets rally in eighth inning to beat Nationals
Mets second baseman Robinson Cano reacts on his solo home run during the eighth inning against the Washington Nationals in an MLB baseball game at Citi Field on Saturday, April 6, 2019. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Pete Alonso had just trotted around the bases when he squeezed next to Tomas Nido in the Mets’ dugout and marveled at how loud Citi Field gets after home runs.
“If he hits one here,” he told Nido, indicating Robinson Cano, “this place is going to absolutely erupt.”
Cano did just that, homering to tie the score in the eighth inning as the Mets rallied for a 6-5 win over the Nationals on Saturday.
“He hit one to the moon,” Alonso said. “And went absolutely berserk. That was really fun. That was cool to see.”
If Alonso thought that was loud, he needed to wait only a few more batters for fans to really get it going. That’s when Keon Broxton, batting with Michael Conforto at second after a two-out double, flared a pitch the other way for an RBI single that gave the Mets a 6-5 lead.
All told, the Mets matched the Nationals’ three-run rally in the top of the eighth by scoring three times in the bottom of the inning — two on the back-to-back homers by Alonso and Cano — against a Nationals bullpen that has a league-worst 10.02 ERA.
The rally erased a disastrous afternoon for Jeurys Familia — who allowed two homers in the top of the eighth, the first time he has allowed multiple homers in his career — and turned a blown save into a victory for the righthander.
The Mets hit five homers, all of which went farther than 400 feet.
“Absolutely love it,” said J.D. Davis, who hit two in the first multi-homer game of his career. “That’s who we are right now. As a team, we pick each other up. That’s the big thing. We got a high-energy team . . . We’ve got plenty of fight . . . We’re not a team that quits, and I think that’s pretty cool.”
Davis finally was able to get to Patrick Corbin in the fourth, walloping the first pitch he saw into the visitor’s bullpen in right-centerfield for a 1-0 lead. He hit his second homer in the sixth, and two batters later, Conforto added a second-decker under the Coca-Cola sign in right. That put the Mets up 3-1.
The Nationals cut the deficit by taking advantage of one of the rarest of baseball misadventures: a two-base passed ball. With Matt Adams at the plate and runners at first and second, Wilson Ramos couldn’t catch Familia’s 90-mph splitter, either losing the ball or thinking Adams — who swung — had foul-tipped it. By the time he found the ball, which had rolled to the backstop, Victor Robles had scored.
Familia said Ramos couldn’t hear him when he told him where the ball was. “Everybody was pointing back, back, back and it was just too late,” Mickey Callaway said. “I’ve never seen that happen before, but it was kind of a crazy play.”
Things further unraveled in the eighth, when Anthony Rendon homered to tie it and Wilmer Difo hit a two-run shot to give the Nationals a 5-3 lead. “They put a pretty good swing on it,” Familia said. “It’s just part of the game. Sometimes it’s going to happen.”
Familia exited to a chorus of boos, but Citi Field soon had an entirely different reason to get loud. Like Alonso, Cano looked to provide some mojo from the dugout — though in a much different way. After his home run, he told Broxton where to hit it, and he listened.
“I looked into the dugout and Robby Cano was saying, ‘Go to rightfield, go to rightfield!’ ” Broxton said. “After that, that was my whole mindset — stay inside the baseball and put something in centerfield or rightfield . . . I got a pitch that was up in the zone and got good wood on it.”
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
