NEW YORK — In a New York Mets clubhouse processing yet another lopsided loss — this one 10-2 in Game 4 of the NLCS, putting New York one game from elimination — Pete Alonso leaned on experience.
“We’ve had to answer the bell all year. It’s no different now,” Alonso said. “We need to be better. We have to apply the lessons (from the first four games) moving forward.”
When you’ve been bombarded through four games the way the Mets have, there is indeed room for improvement. And among those who need to be better starting with Friday’s Game 5 is manager Carlos Mendoza.
One of Mendoza’s chief skills this season has been his unerring belief in his roster. It’s what pacified him during the club’s early low points and it’s what kept the Mets’ subsequent turnaround from ever taking him aback. Talk to players in that clubhouse, and they’ll tell you about what Mendoza’s belief in them — at 0-5, at 22-33, at whatever other low points they individually experienced — meant to reaching this point.
“That is why we are here in the playoffs,” Francisco Alvarez said before the game. “He gives confidence to every player.”
But in this National League Championship Series, Mendoza’s trust in the players who brought the Mets here has come at the expense of the urgency the postseason requires. There have been vanishingly few high-leverage moments in a series this lopsided, and still the Mets have handed too many important at-bats to hitters in slumps and too many critical confrontations to a tiring starter or a lower-leverage reliever.
Take Thursday night.
Mendoza and the Mets knew entering the game that, as excellently as Jose Quintana has pitched for nearly two months, the Dodgers represented a nightmare matchup for the left-hander. No pitcher in baseball throws fewer pitches in the strike zone than Quintana; no team in the National League chases pitches out of the zone less than Los Angeles.
“He’s got to get ahead and he’s got to stay ahead,” Mendoza said. “When he gets behind, 2-0, 3-1, he’s got to come in and they made him pay. This is a team that’s going to do that.”
And yet, Mendoza stuck with Quintana as the exact dynamic he feared played out in the early innings. Quintana didn’t establish credibility in the strike zone with his stuff, so the Dodgers waited him out for walks and advantage counts. Their two run-scoring hits in the third against the lefty came in a 2-0 count (Tommy Edman’s double) and a 3-1 count (Kiké Hernández’s single).
Down a run, Mendoza ran Quintana back out to face the bottom of the Los Angeles order in the fourth. He kept him in to face Shohei Ohtani a third time, even though Ohtani had put the only strike he’d seen from Quintana into orbit to lead off the game. Another walk, Quintana’s fourth, put two on for Mookie Betts.
Worse than sticking with Quintana through Ohtani was going to José Buttó first out of the bullpen. After Buttó recorded the final five outs of the Game 1 blowout, Mendoza acknowledged that the right-hander had slipped down the bullpen hierarchy; when he came into the game Thursday, he’d allowed five runs in his last three outings. Still, he was the choice over a hotter hand like Ryne Stanek or David Peterson, Mendoza saying he was hoping Buttó could generate a groundball.
Buttó instead allowed a two-run double to Betts to push the Los Angeles lead to 5-2.
Contrast that with how LA’s Dave Roberts has deployed his best relief arms this postseason. Rather than saving them for the final third of the game, Roberts has used his best relievers against the top of the opposing order. That’s why Michael Kopech pitched the fifth inning of Game 3, and why Evan Phillips and Blake Treinen were ready for the top of the order twice in Game 4.
Of course, the Mets didn’t want to use Peterson there because they were saving him to start Game 5. After Peterson was a weapon out of the New York bullpen in the first two series, the Mets have handcuffed themselves in using him this time around because of their initial decision to start Kodai Senga in Game 1. New York used Peterson for 40 pitches that day and, because it knew it would need him for at least multiple innings in Game 5, avoided him in big spots early each of the last two nights.
(Had the Mets started Senga in Game 2, they not only would have given the right-hander his customary extra day of rest between outings, they would have given Peterson a clearer shot to pitch in Game 4, behind their most tenuous starter in Quintana.)
We should be clear: The Mets have been outscored 30-9 in this series. Even Bobby Valentine on his best day doesn’t think he could overcome that kind of deficit on his own, and Mendoza hasn’t issued any of the 31 walks the Mets have handed out in four games.
But in the postseason, the job of the manager pivots. The most important time is no longer the hours before the first pitch, when you establish belief and maintain confidence in your roster. Now it’s about putting the team in the best position to succeed on a pitch-to-pitch basis, and Mendoza hasn’t done that as well as the guy across the way through four games.
Of LA’s 30 runs this series, 14 have come against a starter the third time through or a long man out of the bullpen.
The series is not over of course, and the belief that Mendoza has instilled all season still reverberates, justifiably, in a Mets clubhouse that has beaten long odds before. But to pull off one more miracle, day by day, the Mets will need to pair that belief with a greater sense of urgency.
(Photo of Carlos Mendoza pulling Jose Quintana: Luke Hales / Getty Images)
