If March goes in like a lion and out like a lamb, what will they say to describe the August the Mets have just experienced?
After starting the month with 11 defeats in 13 games (compounded by losing the final three of July), the Mets fell from 18 games over .500 to just a half dozen games. In the fortnight since, the offense that was once scuffling has produced 68 runs and seven wins out of their last 10, including a 6-5 walk-off win over the Philadelphia Phillies on Tuesday night at Citi Field
They once were lost, but now they’re found?
“This team knows what it’s capable of,” Brandon Nimmo, who collected the fourth straight hit in the ninth inning to end the game, said. “We’ve got a lot of veteran guys on here that know. For me, personally, this is the most talented team I've ever played on… It's just going out there and executing it every night.”
For Nimmo, that means “keeping it small” and not trying to look too far past the series finale against Philadelphia on Wednesday.
“Let’s take it one game at a time,” he said after his second RBI pulled the Mets to 5.0 games behind the Phillies in the NL East race. “[Wednesday] we have another game against a team that is in front of us. If we can win that game and just control what we can control, then we like our chances.”
The turn of fortune has been on the back of an offense finding its form. Entering Tuesday night's games, the Mets were the best hitting team in all of baseball over the past 15 days with a .319 average and a .951 OPS (both highest in MLB), pounding out 29 home runs (second most) and 99 RBI (most).
“Baseball’s a funny game. Sometimes things start to click together, and we’ve been having that happen lately,” Nimmo said about the turnaround. “We’ve been doing great on the road, and then we come home and continue it.
“I think it’s just a testament to the guys paying attention to the little things and making each at-bat and where we are at the present moment the most important thing, and not trying to look back to the past or the future. Just, ‘What can I do to help the team win right now?’ And I think that attitude has been able to lead to some success for us recently.”
Ahead of the game, David Stearns said they’ve always seen themselves as a “good offensive team” that dealt with pressing and some bad luck.
“We’ve talked a lot about the challenges earlier in the season in leverage spots and runners in scoring position, men on base. And some of that was maybe at times we were pressing a little bit, getting a little bit too aggressive,” Stearns said earlier Tuesday. “But a lot of that was misfortune. And some really unfortunate batted ball luck, and that’s tough to stomach for all of us.
“That’s not a satisfactory answer for any of us. But we did try to focus on what we can actually control: Are we swinging at the pitches we should swing at? When we do, are we putting them in play in ways that we want to put them in play?
What’s changed? “Continue to have good approaches, but we’re having good results, too,” manager Carlos Mendoza said after the win. “Now, we’re getting those balls to find holes, we’re using the whole field, we see it time after time going the other way, with two outs, not trying to do too much, just staying short, and trying to hit line drives as opposed to hit the ball out of the ballpark.
“There’s times where the game will dictate what to do in situations and I feel like we’ve been able to do that.”
The situation dictated that in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth inning, after Starling Marte and Pete Alonso ripped bullet singles, Brett Baty battled to flare a single to left before Nimmo took a 2-0 fastball on the outer half and smacked it the other way to score the winning run.
“If I had to point to one thing, I would say… they just made my job a whole lot easier,” Nimmo said of his teammates' at-bats to load the bases. “A lotta things get the job done, I just need to find the barrel, so just keeping things real simple from my end.”
What Nimmo would really like next is to keep things going now and continue that in the playoffs.
“I’ve always said ‘hottest team wins in playoffs,’” Nimmo said. “It doesn’t matter who's the best team; it’s the hottest team. This would be a good time to keep things going, and we’re very happy with the way the offense is playing right now.”
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