The crowd was primed for playoff baseball. The Mets did not look ready.
“Let’s Go Mets,” chants rang out before the introductions. There’s nothing better than postseason baseball in New York, even a wild-card preliminary, and ever-hopeful Mets fans clearly were ready to rock. The home team, however, did not answer the call in a 7-1 loss to the Padres in Game 1.
The thrill lasted until Max Scherzer’s former Nationals teammate, Josh Bell, laid into a meaty offering as the fourth batter of the night. The pitch was intended to be inside, but instead leaked to the middle before Bell drilled it the opposite way over the left-field fence, an early omen for an ugly evening.
“Baseball can take you to the highest of the highs or the lowest of the lows,” Scherzer said afterward. “This is one of the lowest of the lows.”
The Mets put a few guys on base in the first couple of innings against Padres ace and noted Mets killer Yu Darvish, and stole bases seemingly at will (as Joel Sherman predicted they would), but like past Mets teams they could not deliver an RBI hit, or even a productive out when needed, not that it’s easy against perhaps the game’s only crafty righty.
In the first two innings, the Mets moved a runner to third with only one out, only for Pete Alonso and Eduardo Escobar to whiff when only a fly ball was needed. Alonso, in his first two bats, took a called strike right down the middle, then on another strikeout he accidentally threw his bat about 150 feet into the netting on the third-base side.
Both times, the NL’s RBI king repaired to the dugout shaking his head. It was too early for snapping the wood over his knee, but we know he is capable.
“We didn’t score any runs,” manager Buck Showalter said. “We knew Darvish was going to be a challenge, and he was.”
As a unit, the Mets looked a lot like the Mets of the last couple of years, before they made so many great improvements. By the fourth inning, the cheers had turned to boos. The Mets use music to enhance the show as well as any team, but about that time the Mets had a DJ playing “We are the Champions,” broadcast up on the big screen. That seemed a bit premature.
And like that, the Mets, 101-game winners in the regular season, are a game from elimination at the hands of the Padres, one of five teams never to win a World Series in their current location. Don’t knock them, though.
Nobody tries harder than these Padres, possibly the only team in baseball that outspends its revenue (not counting the Marlins, who have no revenue). The Padres laid out $232 million, sixth most in baseball, and traded half the top dogs in their rich farm system to try to reverse their long history of frustration — more frustrating than that of our local nine.
So give them credit. Today the mid-market team boasts four superstars, including Darvish, a playoff veteran and ace on a roll. Darvish is a fantastic pitcher with an amazing arsenal. But the Mets caught him a year too early. Next season, once the 15-second pitch clock is installed, he will have a real challenge.
This game was billed as a matchup of aces, but only one of them performed to form. Like the Mets, Scherzer was outstanding in the regular season. But the money pitcher brought in for just such an occasion looked a tad overpriced on this day. Not sure about you, but I was imaging a record $43.33 million being flushed down the toilet about the time Manny Machado sent a rocket of a home run out to left field to make it 7-zip.
Scherzer, the highest-salaried player in baseball history, was absolutely torched. Machado’s home run was the Padres’ fourth of the game in 4 ²/₃ innings against Scherzer, who said his big issue was wayward fastball command.
“I don’t know why my fastball ran,” Scherzer said. “Obviously, I got hit a lot.”
He may still be feeling effects from the oblique strain that cost him starts earlier. But characteristically, he didn’t make excuses.
“I felt good,” he said.
By the fifth, Mets fans were impatient, restless. They were of course calculating that they shouldn’t be in this spot, and wouldn’t be had they just won one game against the Cubs last month, or one at Atlanta in a lost weekend that had looked like the low point of otherwise fine season.
Until Friday night, that is. The Mets’ first playoff game in six years represented one of their worst performances. Their very small ball was no match for the Padres, who kept hammering away. Following Bell’s homer came a solo shot by Trent Grisham in the second that made it 3-0 and a three-run homer lined into the corner in left field by leadoff man Jurickson Profar, the dagger at 6-0.
Two batters later Machado homered — a liner to left that just kept going and going. One more night anything like this, and the Mets will be going, going, gone.
