Mets' bats finally wake up in win over Padres
Mets' Pete Alonso is greeted by Starling Marte and Francisco Lindor after all three score on the three-run home run by Alonso during the sixth inning against the San Diego Padres inan MLB baseball game at Citi Field on Sunday, July 24, 2022. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Mets’ slumbering lumber finally awakened on Sunday night.
Too quiet for comfort since before the All-Star break, the Mets’ bats roused in the sixth inning against San Diego, with Pete Alonso’s three-run blast the centerpiece of a five-run outburst. The big inning carried the Mets to an 8-5 win over the Padres before 35,475 at Citi Field that snapped a three-game skid and averted a three-game sweep.
In explaining how Alonso’s homer had an impact for a team that had scored a mere four runs in its previous three games, manager Buck Showalter said, “Sometimes you want something too much, and something like that might let you kind of get back into the flow of who you are and who you want to be.”
Alonso also had a run-scoring double and took over the MLB lead in RBIs with 82 — one more than Aaron Judge — as the Mets’ win helped them restore their NL East lead to 1½ games after Atlanta lost earlier in the day.
Francisco Lindor, Starling Marte and Mark Canha also had a pair of hits and Marte, Lindor and Alonso each scored two runs as the Mets put on the kind of offensive display they likely will need against the high-scoring Yankees when the Subway Series convenes on Tuesday at Citi Field.
“We haven’t really got it done and it’s hard to win when you don’t score,” Lindor said. “Pete giving us our first lead in the series gives us a little boost and we got going. It was just a matter of getting the wheel going, and Pete got it for us.”
The Mets already had begun to stir in the bottom of the fifth when Daniel Vogelbach — acquired Friday in a trade with Pittsburgh — opened with a single and Canha followed with a double. But Luis Guillorme, Tomas Nido and Brandon Nimmo grounded out and the game remained a scoreless tie.
It was a totally different story when the Mets came to bat trailing 1-0 in their next turn. Marte singled to right and Lindor followed with a double down the first-base line to set the table for Alonso. He turned on a 2-and-1 slider from Joe Musgrove and drilled it toward the stands in left-centerfield. Off the bat at 109.3 mph, it went 424 feet for his 25th home run and a 3-1 lead.
“We ran into two buzzsaws,” Alonso said of San Diego’s first two starters, Yu Darvish and Blake Snell. “When you get guys with that type of stuff that are on, it’s kind of tough. We did a really good job today . . . It was the same approach. It’s just we finally got some balls to go our way.”
The Mets made it 5-1 when Vogelbach motored in from second on Guillorme’s two-out flare single to leftfield and Guillorme came around on Nido’s double.
The Mets took an 8-1 lead in the seventh. Alonso had a run-scoring double off the top of the centerfield wall, but after Jeff McNeil and Vogelbach struck out with runners on second and third, two runs scored when Canha hit a slow roller to third for an infield hit and Manny Machado threw it wide of first baseman Eric Hosmer.
San Diego managed to get the tying run into the on-deck circle with a run in the eighth and two in the ninth before Edwin Diaz put out the fire. He got the last three outs while allowing an inherited runner to score for his 21st save.
The Mets’ lineup may have held the spotlight in the end, but in the beginning, it was solid play by their defense that helped Carlos Carrasco navigate traffic through five scoreless innings.
Carrasco gave up five hits and two walks with one strikeout and has a 1.21 ERA in 22 1⁄3 innings in his past four games.
The two biggest defensive plays were second baseman McNeil’s sliding stop of a ground ball in short rightfield with the bases loaded to end the first inning and centerfielder Nimmo’s grab of Austin Nola’s long drive in the sixth that kept the Padres’ lead at 1-0. The Mets also turned double plays in the third and fourth and Nido threw out a would-be base-stealer to end the second, with Lindor holding the tag on him as he went past the base.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
