It was a textbook move, intentionally walking Francisco Lindor with first base open to load the bases in the second inning. Every manager in baseball likely would have done the same as Dave Roberts, especially after Lindor had led off the game with a home run.
Mark Vientos didn’t care.
“I took it personal,” Vientos said in the interview room. “I use it as motivation: ‘All right, you want me up, I’m going to show you.’”
They don’t call him Swaggy V for nothing, after all. Vientos has never lacked for confidence, even when he was struggling to hit big-league pitching a year ago, and now continues to prove he has the game to match the swagger.
In fact, his at-bat in that moment was another demonstration of how much he has grown as a hitter this season, as well as how he continues to blossom into a star slugger and a difference-maker in this postseason.
It was a nine-pitch at-bat, and Vientos fouled off five pitches, four of them sliders, to get to a 3-2 count. At that point, Landon Knack challenged him with a 95-mph fastball and Vientos launched it over the wall in right-center for a grand slam that propelled the Mets to a 7-3 win over the Dodgers in Game 2 of the NLCS on Monday in Los Angeles.
“He just continues to get better,” Lindor said on the field afterward. “It’s great to see how much he wants it.”
The same could be said for these Mets, of course. They’ve been defined by their fight all season, so did anybody really think they would be deterred by an ugly Game 1 loss in this series?
They’re the kings of the bounce-backs, 19-3 in games after losses since Aug. 13, and they continue to do it in the postseason as the stakes get higher.
Carlos Mendoza summed up their resilience succinctly at his postgame news conference in Los Angeles.
“We get punched in the face,” Mendoza said, “but we continue to find ways to get back up.”
This may have been their most impressive bounce-back, considering how poorly they played in Game 1 and how important it was to avoid going down 0-2 to the Dodgers.
So as important as Vientos’ home run was, in some ways Lindor’s leadoff shot may have been even more crucial, sending an immediate jolt through the Mets’ dugout as a way of saying that Game 2 would be different.
Everything had gone wrong a day earlier, from the decision to start Kodai Senga to the poor baserunning and defense, as well as all the empty at-bats against Jack Flaherty.
And now all of that is practically irrelevant because the Mets got the split in LA they needed. In some ways, as weird as it seemed to start Senga when Sean Manaea was on full rest, who knows, maybe it worked out for the best.
Considering Flaherty’s dominance, the Mets may well have lost Game 1 even with Manaea on the mound, which would have changed the equation for Game 2.
Instead, there was Manaea on Monday, pitching like the ace he has been for the last couple of months. His start ended quickly, in the sixth inning, partly because of a rare Jose Iglesias error, but that shouldn’t diminish what Manaea did, breezing through the Dodgers’ lineup for five innings, giving the Mets’ offense time to score some runs.
The left-hander allowed only two hits, and perhaps most impressively, he overmatched Shohei Ohtani as perhaps no one has this season. He had Ohtani thoroughly baffled by the sidearm delivery, striking out his first two times up, once on a very late emergency swing, and then got him on a soft pop-up, as his backside bailed on a nasty sweeper.
Still, because of two walks and the Iglesias error in the sixth, which eventually allowed the Dodgers to cut the lead to 6-3, Mendoza had to get 12 outs from the bullpen, which was probably not part of the game plan.
One way or another it feels as if this series is going to be decided by that Mets’ pen, which is thin on dependable relievers lately, especially if David Peterson is now going to be held out to start Game 5, which seems likely.
But on this day Phil Maton, Ryne Stanek, and Edwin Diaz made it work, each of them getting four outs, though not without some heart-stopping moments.
Maton escaped trouble with an inning-ending double play in the sixth, Diaz came on for Stanek to finish the eighth, leaving two runners on while getting away with a hanging slider to Kiké Hernandez that turned into a fly out to right field.
And finally, in the ninth, Diaz allowed the first two Dodgers to reach base, much as he did in the close-out game against the Philadelphia Phillies, before again beginning to trust his fastball, which was simply electric on Monday night.
It continues to be puzzling as to why Diaz sometimes forgets his fastball can be unhittable and gets slider-happy, but on this night he remembered in time to blow away Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez with fastballs before finishing Freddie Freeman with a very good slider.
That’s the thing: In combination with his fastball, Diaz’s slider can be very effective. But it all starts with making hitters fear the heat.
It all makes for great intrigue as the series now shifts to Citi Field for the next three games. The Mets weren’t going to suddenly go quietly, you knew that. To paraphrase Mendoza, they like a good fight.
Vientos, in particular, apparently likes it even more when someone makes it personal.
