For what felt like the millionth time this season, the Mets made some mistakes in Thursday’s loss to the Chicago Cubs that cost them the game.
Tied 0-0 entering the sixth inning, Freddy Peralta, who had been cruising over the first five innings, got Dansby Swanson to hit a routine grounder to shortstop Ronny Mauricio. The ball was hit right to Mauricio and all he had to do was make the throw to first base for the first out of the inning.
Instead, Mauricio made a low throw and the ball skipped to first baseman Mark Vientos, who couldn’t handle it for a throwing error charged to the shortstop.
The error paved the way for Chicago’s three-run inning, all of which were unearned, and forced Peralta to throw 30 pitches before getting pulled with two outs in the frame.
Not only was manager Carlos Mendoza unhappy after the game with the error because of how routine the play was, the point in time at which it happened also bothered him, not to mention it came on the heels of a game where New York made six errors.
“Especially the leadoff one there – it’s a completely different inning, especially for Freddy’s outing there,” Mendoza said. “It’s just routine plays that are costing us. At this level, you expect to make plays like that, those are routine plays. You understand that they’re not gonna be perfect, but those are as routine as it gets and teams are making us pay for it, especially the past few nights.
Prior to the error, Peralta had kept the Cubs scoreless for five innings and pulled a complete 180 following his season-worst start against the Philadelphia Phillies the last time out. Of course, it’s impossible to say what would’ve happened had the error not happened, but at the very least, it forced Peralta to throw more pitches and ended his night prematurely.
Nevertheless, the right-hander knows mistakes are part of the game and felt he should’ve done more to pick up his defender.
“It happens. I was just trying to calm myself and make my pitches and try to get a ground ball for the double play,” he said.
The Mets, officially at the halfway point of the season, have now lost six straight games, are a season-low 13 games below .500 and their season is on life support.
So, what, if anything, can be done about it?
“I cannot speak for everybody, but what I can say and what I feel is just, losing is no fun,” Peralta said. “And at the end of the day, I know we need to win and that we have a team that is supposed to win. What I can say is we’ve been trying and we’ve been working really hard to get through this and trying to make adjustments.
“Right now we just need to keep trying and play better, myself too. We all need to play better and just try to come back and remind ourselves that we are big leaguers and we are great at this game. We just need to put everything together and try to put up a W every day.”
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