NEW YORK – When the Mets are behind in a game these days, there is a feeling that they will bounce back and pick up the victory. That was the case on Sunday afternoon at Citi Field as New York edged the Nationals, 4-3, and swept the three-game series.
Mets right-hander Christian Scott ended up winning his fourth game of the season. After falling behind by two runs after three innings, Scott settled down and worked into the seventh, the furthest he had gone since returning from Tommy John surgery. Scott allowed an RBI single to Keibert Ruiz in his final inning.
“I felt good. I lowered my pitch count for the most part. I got some really good contact when I needed to,” Scott said. “I was able to limit those pitches in long at-bats.”
“When he is really good, [Scott] bullied [the Nationals] with his heater and then the secondary pitches really played,” interim manager Andy Green said. “I thought he followed that script today. … He commanded the ball all day – besides the hit batsmen and the leadoff walks.”
The bullpen then took over and shut out the Nationals the rest of the way, with Kodai Senga picking up his third save in the past week. Green has yet to announce that Senga is the ninth-inning guy, but the skipper hopes that pitching the last frame becomes a regular occurrence for the right-hander.
“He is doing a nice job,” Green said about Senga. “He is handling it really well. I’m going to continue to talk to him and make sure we take care of him. There will be times where everybody is going to hear [Michael Jackson’s] ‘Beat it’ [Senga’s entrance song] and we have to go in a different direction. But, for us, he is doing everything we want him to do right now. We’ll continue to monitor his health, how he feels. We’ll try to do our best to put him in good positions.”
The Mets have won nine of their last 12 games and are 22-22 since Green took over as interim manager, replacing Carlos Mendoza on June 26. According to catcher Luis Torrens, the team has stayed united and close knit.
“We are just trying to play baseball the right way,” Torrens said through interpreter Alan Suriel. “Thankfully, things are going well and we are just going out there having fun and trying to play well.”
Green has another theory: Resiliency is the reason the Mets are winning of late.
“[In] almost all of these games, we find ourselves down at some point [in] time,” he said. “I think the mentality has flipped from ‘Here we go again’ to ‘Here we go again [in a positive way].’ This is what we do.
“I think there is a big distinction between those two things. Your expectations and your play follows that. I don’t feel anybody deflated after we find ourselves trailing in a baseball game. These guys work incredibly hard.”
In fact, New York was down, 2-0, before it went ahead in the third inning against right-hander Jake Irvin. Jared Young scored the first run for the Amazins on a groundout by Jorge Polanco to cut the lead by one run. Luis Torrens followed and hit a two-run homer to give the Mets a 3-2 lead. It was his sixth home run of the season, the most he has had during a campaign since 2021, when he had 15 homers for the Mariners. It helps that Torrens has been getting a lot of playing time of late.
“I was aggressive there. I was trying to do some damage on the play and trying to help the team out,” Torrens said about the homer. “It’s easier when you have more opportunities to play. You have to take advantage of it when you get that opportunity.”
In the following frame, Francisco Lindor came home on a double by Young.