The Mets got a big swing from A.J. Ewing and a lead from Carson Benge, but Sunday still ended the same way too many of their nights have ended this season: with missed chances and empty at-bats when the game was there to be taken.
That was the story in the eighth inning of New York’s 5-4 loss to the Phillies, when Ronny Mauricio and Francisco Alvarez came up with the bases loaded and one out and failed to cash in. Orion Kerkering had just walked Juan Soto and Bo Bichette on eight straight balls, pushing the tying run to third and putting the right-hander on the brink. He opened Mauricio with a sweeper well above the zone, making it nine balls in a row.
Mauricio still swung at the next pitch, a fastball at the top of the strike zone, and popped it up on the right side of the infield. Bryson Stott tracked it down just behind the infield grass, and the Phillies escaped.
Mets interim manager Andy Green said afterward, “There were certain situations we had takes on in the game today,” Green said postgame. “It’s not every situation.
There’s times where you want aggression on pitches that you should be able to hit and handle. So, different points in time of the game today, there were takes on for guys and then at different points in time, they were turned loose.
We weren’t able to get it just right today.”
That left some uncertainty about whether Mauricio swung through a take sign or whether the Mets had given him the green light to attack. Either way, the result was a missed chance to at least tie the game, if not seize the lead.
Alvarez followed and began the right way, taking two pitches - a sweeper that missed up and in and another sweeper that caught the top of the zone. From there, though, he chased two heaters above the strike zone and struck out swinging on a fastball near his neck to end the inning.
The inning fit an ugly pattern. The Mets stranded runners in scoring position in five straight innings, left the bases loaded with one out in the fifth, went 2-for-16 with runners in scoring position, and finished with 14 runners left on base.
That’s been the season-long issue. New York is hitting .238 with a .678 OPS with runners in scoring position, numbers that rank fourth-lowest in OPS in those situations and last in the league with 216 RBI with runners in scoring position. Sometimes there’s bad batted-ball luck involved, but a lot of this has come down to the quality of the at-bats.
Green saw it that way, too.
“I saw just misses. I saw a bunch of guys taking aggressive passes and just missing pitches.
Obviously, there was a whole ton of times we could have hopped back in front. It was a huge swing from A.J. to do that for us off the bench.
That’s impressive. We just didn’t bring guys home today.”
Ewing’s two-run homer in the sixth brought the Mets level, and Benge later gave them the lead in that same inning with a line drive off the pitcher’s glove for a fielder’s choice on the infield. But the offense couldn’t build on it, and the eighth inning became the clearest example yet of why the Mets keep running into the same wall.
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