Despite the ho-hum 2-1 score, the Mets win over the Pirates had a lot happening in it. Kodai Senga and Mitch Keller were locked in a pitcher’s duel. Juan Soto stole a base. Reed Garrett wore glasses. Mark Vientos’s glove might have broken. Brett Baty hit a go-ahead home run that turned out to be the difference in the game. Edwin Díaz nearly blew the save. See, a lot going on. So lets go back to the beginning.
Senga and Keller, as previously mentioned, were great in different ways. Senga worked a bit of a tightrope, spreading out six hits and two walks over 5.2 innings. Despite getting into trouble in almost every inning he presided over, he and his ghost fork reliably got out of jams. He ended up striking out seven on the day.
Keller was arguably better than his counterpart, but was gotten to in his first and final frames. He threw seven innings of two run ball, striking out eight, surrendering five hits, and generally looking great.
The Mets scored in the first off of a run kind of manufactured by Juan Soto. Soto singled with one out, stole second, and was chased home by a Brandon Nimmo double. That 1-0 lead would hold all the way until the sixth, with Keller dominating and Senga wriggling out of trouble. He stopped being able to wriggle in the sixth, though.
After getting the first two outs with relative ease, Senga allowed a single to Mets spring training legend Alexander Canario, and a very weird double to Jared Triolo that quite literally went through the webbing of Mark Vientos’s glove. That saw Senga’s day come to an end, and a bespectacled Reed Garrett came in to replace him. The glasses did not prove to be effective, however, as he walked Ji-Hwan Bae and Henry Davis to tie the game at one apiece. He did stop the bleeding, getting Adam Frazier to ground out to first.
Keller threw a scoreless bottom of the sixth, and Max Kranick a scoreless top of the seventh, getting the game tied 1-1 in the bottom of the frame. Keller got through Jeff McNeil and Francisco Alvarez before Brett Baty stepped up to the plate. Baty promptly took a 1-1 change up over the left field wall to put the Mets up 2-1, a score that would hold despite some real scary hours in the ninth.
Before that ninth, Ryne Stanek pitched a dominant eighth, striking out two around a single. Edwin Díaz got the call for the save, and was anything but steady.
After getting Davis to lazily fly out to start the inning, he allowed Frazier to walk to first. Díaz, who takes a laissez faire approach to holding on base runners, allowed Frazier to steal second with ease. Isiah Kiner-Falefa hit a tough but playable ball to Francisco Lindor who really goosed the throw (and combined with his 0-4 at the dish, had maybe his worst game of the season), making it first and third with one away. Kiner-Falefa stole second without a throw, putting the skinny 2-1 lead in extreme peril.
Díaz, who might as well have “bend but don’t break” tattooed on his forehead due to his performance this season, struck out Bryan Reynolds on a 3-2 count, and got Joey Bart to ground out to defensive substitute Luisangel Acuña at second base to put the eventful 2-1 game in the books.
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Box scores
Win Probability Added
Big Mets winners: Brett Baty, +27.2% WPA
Big Mets loser: Pete Alonso, -10.2% WPA
Mets pitchers: +53.3% WPA
Mets hitters: -3.3% WPA
Teh aw3s0mest play: Brett Baty’s home run in the seventh, +24.9% WPA (who could have seen this coming)
Teh sux0rest play: Henry Davis’s run scoring walk in the sixth, -16.3% WPA
