Mets try to put playoff loss to Padres in rearview mirror
Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts misses the tag on Mets centerfielder Brandon Nimmo during the third inning at Citi Field on Monday. Credit: Noah K. Murray
Seeing the Padres again at Citi Field had to conjure up some terrible flashbacks Monday for Buck Showalter & Co. There was no avoiding that.
Those awful memories from last October are streaked in brown and gold, like a mustard stain on a favorite shirt, the ruins of a 101-win season smudged forever onto the Mets’ collective psyche. To say nothing of Showalter’s futile, desperate effort to smear Joe Musgrove in the clincher, only to have his sticky-stuff gambit come up dry.
The Mets can’t erase what happened in that painful loss to the Padres in the NL Wild Card Series. But they were able to put a more positive spin on the immediate future with Monday’s 5-0 victory in the opener of this rematch, thanks to Max Scherzer’s rebound and two-run doubles by Jeff McNeil and Francisco Lindor.
The revenge-minded Scherzer, climbing the Citi Field mound for the first time since he was booed off it in Game 1 last October, allowed only Ha-Seong Kim’s one-out single in five scoreless innings (six strikeouts). Yu Darvish again outlasted Scherzer in the sequel, but McNeil’s two-out double off him in the third inning was all the Mets needed.
The Padres gave Scherzer a workout, stretching him to 97 pitches, but he twice escaped early jams. He stranded a pair of first-inning walks by getting Xander Bogaerts to hit into a double play and later left another runner at third on Manny Machado’s infield pop-up.
Scherzer admitted it was a grind, but he still trimmed his ERA from 6.35 to 4.41.
“I’m not broken,” he said. “I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I just had to fine-tune some things.”
As the Mets talked Monday afternoon about putting the wreckage from that wild-card series in the rearview mirror, there’s one new wrinkle to this rivalry that’s impossible to overlook. For as much as owner Steve Cohen invested over the winter to guard against a first-round exit this year, building baseball’s highest payroll at $375 million, the Padres actually spent more in the offseason, showing even less fiscal restraint when stretched out over the long term.
The tab? Roughly $945 million, dwarfing Cohen’s $510 million total, even though San Diego’s 2023 payroll ranks third overall at $275 million, roughly $100 million lower than the Mets. That blizzard of cash helped bring in Bogaerts ($280M) and secure Darvish ($108M) and perennial MVP candidate Machado ($350M) well into the next decade.
Not to mention tweaking the Mets by adding Seth Lugo ($15M) for the starting role he always wanted in Flushing as well as taking advantage of the Yankees’ revival of Matt Carpenter ($12M). Yes, the Padres took a run at basically everyone in the offseason, out Mets-ing the Mets, whom they had knocked out handily months earlier.
“When I look at last year, the past is in the past and it stunk what happened here,” Brandon Nimmo said before Monday’s game. “They flat-out beat us. We gave them our best punches with our pitchers, and they’re even better now.”
Ironically, the only Mets starter to deliver a W in that wild-card series is gone: Jacob deGrom now is a $185 million Ranger. Scherzer was a complete disaster in that playoff opener, teeing up seven runs (four homers) for his worst postseason performance since 2011.
That’s some of the baggage Scherzer lugged to the mound with him Monday, but when he finally walked off for the night — after an 11-pitch strikeout of No. 9 hitter Austin Nola — the Mets’ lone healthy $43 million ace sounded a little lighter.
“I’ll always say I want to go deeper,” Scherzer said. “It’s tough to say you only want to pitch five innings. They did a good job of grinding with me. But the team got a win. So any time the team wins, I’m happy.”
Following Scherzer in this payback series are a pair of the Mets’ injury-related fill-ins: David Peterson — the sub for Jose Quintana (rib surgery) — and Tylor Megill, the last-minute rotation plug for Justin Verlander (shoulder muscle strain). Chris Bassitt isn’t around to make up for his Game 3 clunker — he’s pitching for the Blue Jays now — and his replacement, Kodai Senga, won’t get the chance to unleash the ghost fork on the Padres either.
The timing of this October do-over for the Mets wasn’t ideal. In addition to those rotation issues, Starling Marte (neck strain) was on the shelf for Monday’s series opener and the offense as a whole was struggling out of the gate.
As for the lineup, entering Monday, Pete Alonso was responsible for half of the Mets’ 10 homers and nearly a third (11) of their team RBIs as the lineup has been a collection of soft sub-.250 hitters. But one look at the Padres and the Mets found a way, denting Darvish for five earned runs.
“It’s nice to play well against them and get a win,” McNeil said. “They’re a really good team. We’ll probably run into them again — maybe in the postseason. We’ll see.”
That seems likely. But first the Mets get two more cracks at them this week, so October can wait for now.
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.
