Friday night’s bullpen collapse and 5-4 loss to Arizona couldn’t have been very good for Mets morale, but over the course of the next two days, the scraptastic New York club picked itself up and earned a pair of victories. Much of the credit goes to some superb starting pitching.
It’s easy to get sick of analysts rambling about how the ace of a pitching staff is big and macho and how he is supposed to stop a losing streak in its tracks. Rational people like myself know that a starting pitcher doesn’t really play better when his team has lost a bunch recently, but Johan Santana was really good on Saturday afternoon in a streak-stopping 4-3 victory.
“We won and that’s the most important thing,” said Santana, whose 2.61 ERA doesn’t match his 1-2 record. “I wanted to help and somehow stop it and give our team a chance to win and that’s all I was doing. I was going inning by inning, trying to keep the score there and trying to compete and get ahead.”
Santana pitched seven innings with five strikeouts, one walk and three runs allowed while throwing 74 of 108 pitches for strikes. Arizona struck first on a Ryan Roberts solo home run in the second inning, but just like on Friday, the Mets scored four runs in an inning. This time New York turned the trick in the fourth, as Mike Nickeas and Andres Torres both hit two-RBI singles to put the Metsies on top.
Although Arizona would get a pair back in the top of the fifth on a Paul Goldschmidt double, Santana only allowed one baserunner in the next two innings, and Bobby Parnell combined with Frank Francisco to preserve the Mets lead until the end. Despite not factoring into any of the run scoring, Daniel Murphy was the star on offense with four singles in four at-bats. He was very humble about it, though.
“That’s a bonus for me. We’re trying to get wins around here,” Murphy said, according to MetsBlog contributor Amit Badlani. “We end up winning 95 ballgames and end up in the playoffs, everybody’s going to get a piece of it. Johan’s day today, Torres had the big hit that drove in some runs, Turner had a nice day. So, it was nice.”
No extra base hits for the Mets on Saturday, but they did enough early on to get rid of young Arizona starter Patrick Corbin quickly. The southpaw walked two, struck out two and allowed five hits. He was charged with all four runs, but left the game after Nickeas singled with the bases loaded to make the score 2-1 with one out in the fourth. Josh Collmenter came on and let up the Torres single.
