Pete Alonso may want a redo on his postseason debut.
The Mets first baseman was eager for his first taste of playoff baseball on Friday night, but he missed an early chance to make it worth the wait in a 7-1 loss to the Padres in Game 1 of the wild-card series at Citi Field.
Alonso finished the night 1-for-4 with a pair of strikeouts. The cleanup hitter had plenty of company as the Mets struggled to mount much of anything against Padres ace Yu Darvish and went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position.
“It’s a tough one,” Alonso said. “Tough game today for a lot of us. But we gotta get back at it tomorrow.”
With the crowd still raucous in the first inning, despite the Mets trailing 2-0, Alonso stepped to the plate with one out and runners on the corners. The first pitch to him from Yu Darvish was a 93 mph sinker on the inner half of the plate. He turned on it and crushed it for home run distance, but foul.
Alonso then swung through a 91 mph cutter in the zone before watching another cutter right down the middle get called for strike three.
Instead of sending the crowd into an even bigger frenzy, and getting the Mets back in the game, Alonso let some air out of the building.
It didn’t get much better in Alonso’s second at-bat, leading off the fourth inning. He got into a 1-2 count and then took a mighty hack on a middle-in 94 mph fastball, striking out and sending his bat flying into the netting over the Padres’ dugout.
“You just gotta flush it,” said Alonso, who singled in the fifth and flew out in the eighth. “We have a challenge and we’re going to face it head on and we’re going to run towards it.”
On the eve of Game 1, Alonso said he hoped the Citi Field crowd would go “buck wild” and be “rowdy” throughout the night. The 41,621 fans in attendance obliged in the early innings, but the Mets gave them little to cheer for as the game went on.
ILast weekend, in an NL East showdown against the Braves, Alonso went 3-for-10, but had no RBIs or extra-base hits. The Mets will almost certainly need more than that — and more than what he provided Friday night — to have a chance to turn the series around beginning Saturday.
“We just gotta dig our heels in and be ready to fight,” Alonso said. “I know that we will. I know we have our work cut out for us, but I’m confident we’re going to be ready to go tomorrow.”