The New York Mets were supposed to play good fundamental baseball this year, but yesterday they forgot how to do that.
The New York Mets seemingly forgot how to play baseball yesterday against the St. Louis Cardinals, and they’ve especially forgotten how to hit. Star shortstop Francisco Lindor is supposed to be one of the leaders who steer the Mets out of this sort of thing, but instead Lindor was one of the main culprits.
Lindor played Little League baseball yesterday, forgetting how many outs there were on defense in the first inning, then getting picked off while standing almost six feet away from first base in the sixth. It was the kind of cluelessness that Mets fans thought they’d seen the last of last season as GM David Stearns overhauled the roster to get more savvy players.
The Mets shortstop wasn’t one of them yesterday, though, and manager Carlos Mendoza knows it--especially since one of his managerial mantras is that while physical mistakes happen, mental mistakes are inexcusable.
Mendoza had little problem with Lindor getting picked off before outfielder Juan Soto’s solo home run because he was planning to steal second on the pitch in question, and the Cardinals sniffed it out.
That take strains credibility well beyond the breaking point. Lindor was standing in no man’s land, not leaning toward second, and when the throw happened it looked as if he thought it was something that couldn’t possibly happen.
Forgetting the number of outs was a different matter, though, and Mendoza’s call on that one was straight up.
“There’s no excuses,” manager Carlos Mendoza said, referring specifically to Lindor’s first-inning gaffe in a piece written by Anthony DiComo of MLB.com. “And he’ll be the first one that tells you that.”
Lindor was smart enough to agree, and to offer no challenge to anything that happened.
“Inexcusable,” Lindor said. “I just forgot the outs. I should have been better.”
The offense should be better, too, but the numbers tell a different story. During one stretch in the Cardinals series, the Mets sent 27 hitters to the plate without getting a hit, and they went 17 innings without scoring a run. Soto is hitting, but no one else is helping out much.
The Mets were also 0-for-11 with runners in scoring position yesterday, and their RISP average is currently .162. The basics of situational hitting have been close to non-existent, and Mendoza ticked off the problems.
“With runners in scoring position, there’s a few things there -- ultra aggressive at times, expanding at times as well with some of the guys,” Mendoza said. “We’ve just got to get back to what we do well, which is controlling the strike zone, getting good pitches to hit and doing damage. [We have] good hitters that right now, for a couple of games, they’re not getting it done.”
The sample size is small, but as the Mets learned last year, it doesn’t take long to crash and burn when you’re playing this kind of baseball. The Mets are now 3-3, and they need to turn things around, starting tonight against the Giants.