CINCINNATI -- About as animated as he gets on a baseball field, Carlos Mendoza stood in front of umpire Carlos Torres and wagged his finger. He yelled and gesticulated while Torres stood and listened, before informing Mendoza -- for a second time -- that he was no longer welcome on the field of play.
Mendoza’s ejection in the seventh inning Tuesday punctuated the Mets’ latest loss, a 5-3 defeat to the Reds at Great American Ball Park. It also highlighted a season-long trouble area for the team.
After JJ Bleday walked on a low 3-2 pitch in the seventh inning, someone in the Mets’ dugout -- not Mendoza -- began chirping at Torres. The Mets were still upset that Carson Benge had been called out on strikes on three borderline pitches in the sixth inning, all of them seemingly out of the zone. Problem was, the Mets had lost both their Automated Ball-Strike System challenges early in the game. That left Benge with none.
When Bleday subsequently walked on a relatively close pitch, tempers in the Mets’ dugout flared. Torres ejected Mendoza once for the unidentified comments from the bench, then a second time after the manager came to the field to argue.
“Obviously, I wasn’t pleased with the strike zone, especially with that Benge at-bat there,” Mendoza said. “I went back and looked at some of the pitches, and I wasn’t happy about it.”
Still, things might have been different had the Mets retained even one of their ABS challenges. (Teams get two per game, plus additional challenges if their initial ones are correct.) Instead, the Mets lost their first challenge when Francisco Alvarez questioned a 2-1 ball call to Bleday in the first inning, then the other when Marcus Semien tapped his helmet on a called third strike with the bases empty and two outs in the second.
Alvarez said he thought his challenge was important to get pitcher Kodai Senga back into a count with a man on base in a scoreless game. But both challenges occurred in relatively low-leverage situations, which has been a theme for the Mets.
Though the team came into Tuesday’s play ranked 11th in the Majors in net calls overturned, they were 18th in net runs for/against using ABS. That suggests that while the Mets have won their share of challenges, they haven’t regularly done so in important spots.
“We were super aggressive today,” Mendoza said. “Especially you lose that first one right there early, a little too much there. We’ve got to do a better job. And that’s something we will continue to talk to the guys about.”