The New York Mets continued to play flat, listless baseball against the Dodgers, and the losses continue to mount.
The New York Mets were shut out for the third time in their last four games as they lost yet another listless offensive effort to the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-0.
The Mets got just a single baserunner in the first seven innings, which tells most of the story for this particular game. It continued the Mets' trend of sending one hapless hitter after another to the plate, as they were just shut out twice in three games by the Athletics over the weekend.
The Dodgers rode the pitching of left-hander Justin Wrobleski, who threw a tidy eight innings of shutout baseball, giving up just two hits and throwing 90 pitches along the way. Reliever Tanner Scott finished up in the ninth in a non-save situation.
The Dodgers got all the offense they needed in the first inning, as a single by Will Smith brought home Shohei Ohtani after Ohtani was hit by a pitch, then advanced to second on a walk to Kyle Tucker. Mets starter David Peterson was slightly better in this one after a couple of bad outings, but without offensive support from his teammates it was only a matter of time until the bottom fell out.
That happened in the fourth inning, when the Dodgers rallied for three runs to extend their lead to 4-0, with the key hit being a three-run bomb by Andy Pages that scored Tucker and Freddy Freeman. The rally could have been shut down by a highlight-reel double play with two on and one out as shortstop Francisco Lindor fielded a grounder behind second and flipped to second baseman Marcus Semien, but Semien bobbled the transfer and Pages finished off the Mets.
"If we turn that double play, it's probably a spectacular double play," Semien said in a story written by Aiden Gonzalez of ESPN. "And it's one that we ended up needing bad and it didn't happen."
The Mets need hitting more than a double play right now, but that's not happening either, and manager Carlos Mendoza offered no solutions.
"At some point, during the regular season of 162, you're going to face adversity, and here we are -- pretty early, facing adversity," said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza after the loss dropped the Mets to 7-10. "We just got to find a way to get through it."
It won’t get easier. The Dodgers will send Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound tonight, and on Wednesday the Mets get to go up against Ohtani. Mendoza’s quotes continue to ring hollow after a series of dramatic changes that were supposed to energize the Mets with clean, fundamental baseball, but you can’t win if you don’t hit and score runs.
"We got to keep going," Mendoza said. "The back of their baseball card would say that they'll come out of it. We just got to continue to push those guys and continue to work with them. You're going to go through stretches when it's hard, and right now we're in the middle of that stretch. We got to just ride this storm and keep going."