9/6/20

Metstradamus - Stretching Out And Melting Down


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When Seth Lugo threw a meatball down the middle to Rhys Hoskins that he immediately put on to the m&m tarp in left field, I figured it would be another long night. Lugo was missing his spots in the first and frankly was lucky that he got out of that inning down only 1-0.
But Lugo battled the rest of the way, and not in the sense the he battled because he plays for Art Howe, but battled because he played Hoskins like a fiddle in the next two at-bats. He only threw him two fastballs in the second at-bat in the third and made sure he elevated them to strike him out, and in the fifth just threw him filthy junk to strike him out again. Those were the highlights of his night as he struck out eight and walked two in five innings as he was stretched out to 81 pitches.

The Mets scratched and clawed their way back and onward. Andres Gimenez, starting at shortstop again for Amed Rosario, drove in Jeff McNeil to tie the score with a base hit in the third, and Michael Conforto who is having a year as sweet as a guava empanada, dunked a base hit to left to score Gimenez to make it 2-1. But the key play in the game came in the fourth with Todd Frazier on third after reaching on a hit-by-pitch, and Jeff McNeil on second after a double (he was 2-for-4 and has 13 hits in his last 9 games so I think we can stop batting him 7th now.) Gimenez popped a ball up to short right field. Neil Walker backpedaled while Bryce Harper came in on the ball. Inexplicably, Harper decided to peel off and let Walker handle it, thinking that … well I don’t know what he was thinking but he probably assumed that Frazier wasn’t going anywhere.

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