Amazin star power just wasn’t enough
ATLANTA — Jeff McNeil showed up for the Mets’ biggest games since 2016 and might win a batting title for it.
The rest of the Met stars essentially noshowed, so the club almost certainly will not win the NL East title.
The Mets had lined up their three best starters — Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt — for their most important series in six years and the trio went meh, worse and awful. They called up perhaps the majors’ best prospect in Francisco Alvarez, who went 8-for-8 in swinging at first pitches and 0-for-8 in the full at-bats. They brandished two near certain top-10 NL MVP finishers in Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor, who were thoroughly outproduced by their first base and shortstop counterparts on the Braves, Matt Olson and Dansby Swanson.
The Mets arrived at Truist Park knowing if they swept three games they would win their first division title since 2015. They will return to Citi Field having been swept and now needing a baseball Hail Mary to win the NL East.
Buck Showalter tried to inspire his troops to the cause, briefly meeting with the team after a 5-3 loss Sunday night to remind all in the clubhouse that this was still a really good 98-win team finishing a strong season. The problem? The other clubhouse housed a 100-win team with championship pedigree.
“We played well, but the Braves played better,” Pete Alonso said of the lost weekend. That sentiment reflected a whole season. Atlanta found a gear the Mets are still missing. So, the defending World Series winners are now on the doorstep of a fifth straight NL East crown. The magic number is one, so if the Braves take one of three from the Marlins or the Mets lose one of three against the Nationals, Atlanta will get a bye directly to a Division Series. The Mets are now likely to host the bestof-three wild-card series beginning Friday — when the extra time off might benefit getting Starling Marte (finger) healthy enough to play and resting the bodies, in particular, of the older deGrom and Scherzer and the heavily played Alonso and Lindor.
“It’s not a good feeling,” Brandon Nimmo said. “It feels terrible and I really just don’t have any other words for it.”
That is because this was as close to a playoff series as possible without the loser going home. Had the Mets just salvaged the finale, they would have left tied atop the NL East and having won the season series 10-9. That would have given them the tiebreaker if the clubs finished deadlocked after 162 games. Instead, Atlanta, which once trailed the season series 8-4, won 10-9.
That is not even with the most painful big lead the Mets have lost. They led the NL East by 10 ¹/₂ games on June 1. So without a baseball miracle from Monday to Wednesday, the Mets will have blown the biggest division lead since the 1995 Angels also lost a 10 ¹/₂-game advantage. In the Mets’ situation, they were 63-44 since June 1. But when even one more win would have been mammoth, they were just 1-6 in the last two series against a Brave team that is 76-32 since June 1. In this series in which the Mets lost by two runs, three runs and two runs that deGrom, Scherzer and Bassitt combined to yield 11 runs in 14 ¹/₃ innings set the Mets up for failure. And the first base/shortstop matchup assured the demise. Olson, the first-base replacement for long-time Mets killer Freddie Freeman, and Swanson each homered in all three games. All told, they were 9-for-20 with six homers and nine RBIs. The Mets had seven RBIs as a team, none by Alonso or Lindor, who also failed to produce an extra-base hit in a combined 5-for-23.
Swanson was the best player in the series on both sides of the ball. Lindor was 2-for-13.
“I didn’t have the series that I wanted to have,” Lindor said. Showalter defended his stars, saying, “I look at all the games that our guys showed up and gave us this opportunity [to be in the playoffs] and I don’t have a short memory.”
The long memory is that the Mets led the NL East for 175 games. The Braves just six, but it is six and counting. Though that was no fault of McNeil.
He was 7-for-13 in this series to raise his average to .326, a point behind the Dodgers’ Freeman for the major league lead. He was 3-for-5 in the finale and scalded his two outs, including a liner to right off closer Kenley Jansen to end the game. McNeil homered off starter Charlie Morton in the third, an inning after Daniel Vogelbach had done the same. It felt like a symbolic tide change. For the Braves’ overwhelming power advantage had signified their dominance in these last two showdown series. After McNeil’s leadoff homer, Alonso, Eduardo Escobar and Vogelbach singled consecutively to give the Mets a 3-1 lead and first and third with no outs. But from there to McNeil’s closing out, the Mets produced no runs on three singles.
So they fell in their most important game since Oct. 5, 2016, when they lost the sudden-death wild card to the Giants. This was not elimination, as much as illumination that won’t change without the best of Steve Cohen’s $290 million payroll rising to the moment.