The Mets opened their three-game series against the Washington Nationals with a listless performance on a cold Tuesday night, falling 5-0 to the team currently six games behind them in the NL East.
The Mets came into the game having won eight of their last 11. They swept the Athletics in Oakland, won a series against the Dodgers in Los Angeles, and split a four-game set with the Giants in San Francisco, averaging 5.5 runs per game over that stretch.
On Tuesday, the bats simply didn’t show up.
Nationals starting pitcher Josiah Gray looked nearly unhittable for most of his outing, striking out nine Mets in six innings while allowing no runs on just four hits. Despite striking out just 6.65 batters per nine innings coming into the game, Gray posted an impressive 43% whiff rate on the night, with his slider doing the majority of the damage, registering nine whiffs on 13 swings.
He had Mets hitters flailing for much of the evening, and the home team just looked exhausted after their 10-game west coast road trip, even coming off of an off-day. The crowd seemed out of it as well on a chilly night, only getting loud to groan at a Mets strikeout or when they started a “Let’s Go Knicks” chant in the top of the 8th inning.
Things weren’t much better for New York in the field.
Before Tuesday’s game, the Mets put reliever Edwin Uceta on the IL with an ankle injury which enabled them to call up Jose Butto from Triple-A before the mandatory 10 days elapsed since he had been sent down.
It had been eight days since Butto last pitched, and the rust was evident. The right-hander was unable to make it out of the fifth inning, allowing two runs and four hits with six walks in 4.2 innings. He threw just 46 of his 93 pitches for strikes and only threw nine first-pitch strikes to the 24 hitters he faced.
“It’s a little difficult,” Butto said through a translator when asked about the amount of time off between starts, “but as a professional, you have to go out there and make sure that you’re active, you’re throwing your bullpens, and just be prepared for whenever you’re called on to pitch in the game.”
“It wasn’t the best of days for me,” he admitted. “I battled as best as I could and things just didn’t come out the way that I wanted them to.”
The erratic performance from the 25-year-old was an encapsulation of the Mets’ rotation struggles early in the 2023 season.
It should have been Max Scherzer making this start tonight, but he’s serving a 10-game suspension handed down by MLB after the right-hander was ejected from last Wednesday’s game for using a foreign substance. An accusation that the veteran denies. Scherzer’s co-ace in the rotation, Justin Verlander, is still working his way back from a shoulder injury, fellow right-hander Carlos Carrasco is also currently on the IL with a bone spur in his elbow, and left-hander Jose Quintana is out until the summer with a rib injury.
“It’s hard,” admitted Mets manager Buck Showalter before the game when asked about managing the team’s rotation injuries. “It’s four of our guys out, but it’s a great opportunity for some other people. We were hoping it wouldn’t happen this early, but we felt like there was a good chance we were gonna have to dig into the depth at some point.”
In order for the Mets to compete without a healthy rotation, their offense is going to need to carry them. Yet, they only had one scoring opportunity in the game.
Trailing 2-0, the Mets loaded the bases in the bottom of the 5th after Brett Baty doubled, Francisco Alvarez reached on an infield single, and Brandon Nimmo was hit by a pitch. However, after Starling Marte battled back from 0-2 to push the count full, Gray struck him out with a slider.
The Nationals would capitalize the next inning, scoring three runs on four hits off of reliever Jimmy Yacabonis, even though Yacabonis seemed like he had induced an inning-ending groundball from Alex Call. Second baseman Luis Guillorme broke the wrong way, and the ball rolled into center field to keep the inning alive.
“I didn’t see it whatsoever until it got through me,” Guillorme said after the game. “I hate not picking up my pitchers. It cost him a couple of extra pitches and a couple of runs. For me, I take pride in my defense, so stuff like that happens, I’m not happy about it.”
Yet, despite their poor performance on Tuesday, the Mets aren’t looking to make excuses about the road trip or the injuries.
“That’s a very convenient excuse,” said Showalter after the game. “One our guys won’t use. You can always come up with something like that, but I’d be surprised if our guys went there. It’s a fact, but I don’t think it’s healthy to hold onto that reason.”
The Mets will look to put the excuses and poor performance behind them when these two teams are back at Citi Field on Wednesday at 7:10 pm with Kodai Senga taking on MacKenzie Gore.
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