STILL GOT IT
deGrom, Cespedes flash vintage form in Opening Day victory
This was anything but a boar-ing start to the 2020 season for the Mets.
Yoenis Cespedes, two years removed from his last regular-season game — in part because of an accident on his ranch that involved a wild boar — took responsibility for the Mets offense Friday, with a rocket he won’t soon forget.
“Some people said good things, a lot of people said bad things, and that was one of the things that motivated me to come back,” Cespedes said after his seventh-inning home run carried the Mets to a 1-0 victory over the Braves on Opening Day before several thousand cardboard cutouts at Citi Field. “[Today] proved to me that I can still be the same player I used to be.”
Cespedes, the DH, pounced on a Chris Martin fastball that landed in the left-field seats and then watched Justin Wilson and Edwin Diaz each pitch a scoreless inning to seal the victory. Afterward, the Mets doused Luis Rojas with a concoction of various foods and liquids, in celebration of his first big-league managerial victory.
“I don’t know what they threw at me, but they threw a lot of stuff,” Rojas said. “There’s some protein shake and maybe some Jell-O mix. It feels sticky and the smell is getting a little different with time.”
Diaz, who lost the closer’s job last season, retired the Braves in the ninth, after Jacob deGrom, Seth Lugo and Justin Wilson had combined for eight scoreless innings.
Mike Soroka, who finished as the runner-up to Pete Alonso in last season’s NL Rookie of the Year voting, pitched six scoreless innings for the Braves before Cespedes got to Martin in the seventh. Cespedes had last played a regular-season game on July 20, 2018, before undergoing separate heel surgeries and then sustaining multiple ankle fractures in May 2019 on his ranch attempting to avoid the wild boar.
“We have a feel that something is going to happen when he’s at the plate and he showed it again today,” Rojas said. “It’s almost like he didn’t lose a beat of who he is.”
Cespedes, who is a free agent after the season, said he can still be the force that carried the Mets’ lineup for parts of three seasons.
“With the way I have been preparing myself and will continue to prepare myself and the way that I have been feeling better each and every day, I will return to the player from back then,” Cespedes said.
DeGrom dominated over five shutout innings in which he allowed one hit and one walk and struck out eight. The right-hander extended his scoreless streak to a careerbest 28 innings, dating to last season, before Lugo replaced him to start the sixth.
The Braves’ lone hit against deGrom was Ronald Acuna Jr.’s broken-bat single in the third. DeGrom was at 50 pitches by the end
of that inning, but threw only 22 over the next two frames.
Originally, Rojas had indicated deGrom would be on a pitch count of about 85, after his workload was curtailed in camp by a sore lower back that forced him to leave an intrasquad scrimmage after only one inning. DeGrom returned for a simulated game on Sunday in which he threw 60 pitches. But after deGrom got through five innings Friday with his pitch count in the 70s, he said pitching coach Jeremy Hefner decided it was enough.
For deGrom, there was the challenge of getting adrenaline in an empty ballpark.
“It definitely pumps you up when there are fans in the stands,” deGrom said. “We play to play in front of the fans, so it definitely was a little different, but that being said for me when somebody steps in I want to get them out and it felt different, even looking around it felt like there was more interaction in the batter’s box than normal. Other than that I felt like it was pretty close to the same Opening Day feel, but not quite.”
The Mets are now 39-20 all-time on Opening Day, with a .661 winning percentage that remains the best in the major leagues in openers.
“I’m excited about a lot of things,” Rojas said.