NEW YORK -- Put into historical context, the seven walks Zack Wheeler allowed in a 12-9 Mets loss to the Nationals on Sunday were not so unusual. Over the decades, baseball has played witness to hundreds of such games -- most forgettable, some not. In the 1961 season alone, three pitchers walked at least 11 batters apiece in a game -- and all three won. (Two of them, Stan Williams and Steve Barber, pitched 11-inning complete games.)

A.J. Burnett famously walked nine batters in a 2001 no-hitter. Nine years later, Edwin Jackson threw a no-no with a mere eight free passes. The record for walks in a game? That would be 16, by Tommy Byrne in 1951 and Bruno Haas in 1915.

Before Wheeler, Mets pitchers had walked at least seven on 59 occasions, including such legends as Dwight Gooden, Jerry Koosman and, of course, Nolan Ryan. And Ryan. And Ryan again, 11 times in five years. Most recent was Oliver Perez in 2010 -- who later resurfaced as a successful lefty specialist for the Mariners, D-backs, Astros, Nationals and Indians. Last year in that role, Perez walked seven batters the entire season.

Of course, the Mets weren’t thinking about Perez or Ryan or anyone but Wheeler on Sunday, when he walked one in the first inning, two in the second and four -- the last of them with the bases loaded, prompting a long journey to the mound by manager Mickey Callaway -- in the fifth. Gelled together with three RBI hits and a sacrifice fly, the walks resulted in seven runs off Wheeler in 4 2/3 innings. Wheeler threw 103 pitches, fewer than half of them for strikes.

“It was just an embarrassing day for me,” Wheeler said. “It’s one of those ones that you just forget, and look forward to your next start.”

More walks would come. The first reliever out of the bullpen, Tim Peterson, issued five more free passes, including another with the bases loaded in the sixth. The next, Luis Avilan, did not walk anyone, but he hit a batter and served up a three-run homer to Anthony Rendon -- a blast that took some of the punch out of subsequent three-run homers by Pete Alonso and Michael Conforto.

By that point, Wheeler had long since walked to the showers.

“The command, the control -- just too many walks,” Callaway said. “He’s a better strike-thrower than that.”

Walks, to some extent, have always had a place on Wheeler’s baseball card. Like many hard throwers, Wheeler struggled early in his career to find the strike zone. In his first professional season as a first-round Draft pick, the right-hander walked 38 batters in 58 2/3 innings. Even after breaking into the big leagues, Wheeler was prone to control lapses, walking an average of four batters per nine innings over his first three seasons.

That changed last year, when Wheeler cut his walk rate below three per nine for the first time in his career. Better control meant better results; after the All-Star break, Wheeler walked 15 batters in 11 starts, going 9-1 with a 1.68 ERA in those games.

Such ability is what Wheeler tried to lock in this offseason, hoping, like Jacob deGrom, to jump seamlessly from 2018 to ’19. Consider it a difficult line to, well, walk. After Sunday’s game, Callaway pointed to a minor mechanical flaw that made Wheeler release the ball a bit later than normal. Wheeler mostly concurred, believing it’s “a pretty simple fix.”

“It’s frustrating for sure,” Wheeler said. “It’s kind of what you pride yourself on is fixing things in the inning. That’s what a lot of great pitchers do. It’s frustrating when you can’t figure it out mid-inning. But you’ve just got to leave that behind.”

Another rally

If the Mets could take solace from Sunday's loss, it was due to the fact that they once trailed in the game, 12-1. New York chased starter Max Scherzer during a five-run rally in the seventh inning and made things even tighter in the ninth, thanks in large part to three-run homers from Alonso and Conforto.

“We did a really good job of fighting in the later innings,” Alonso said. “Us coming back and fighting back ... making it a ballgame, I think that’s a special characteristic in a team.”

It was similar to what the Mets did last weekend in Washington, scoring seven runs over the eighth and ninth innings of an 11-8 win on March 30, then scoring three eighth-inning runs the next day in a 6-5 loss.

"We feel like we can play with them,” Callaway said. “We feel like we can do anything we want. I’m excited. Hey, they have a good lineup, they have a good team, they have some good starters. But ours are just as good. And we’re going to give them a battle every time we’re out there. Whether we’re up or down, we’re going to keep on fighting. And we're not going to back down from them.”

Up next

To keep deGrom and their other pitchers sharp, the Mets skipped Jason Vargas’ second turn through the rotation, lining deGrom up to make his first career start against the Twins at 7:10 p.m. ET on Tuesday. deGrom is riding one of the best runs of his career, taking streaks of 26 consecutive scoreless innings and 26 straight quality starts -- the latter tied for MLB’s all-time record -- into the series opener.