Griffin Canning hit a bit of a rough patch his last two times out.
The right-hander was knocked around by the Dodgers in a rain-shortened outing and then suffered his third loss of the season after issuing four walks and allowing five runs to the lowly Chicago White Sox.
But facing Los Angeles again on Wednesday at Chavez Ravine, Canning delivered perhaps his most impressive outing of the season.
The Mets handed him an early three-run lead and he cruised from there — holding the high-powered Dodgers lineup to just a walk and two singles while striking out four over the game’s first four innings.
Canning did find himself in some danger in the fifth, as Dalton Rushing lined a one-out single, but he bounced back nicely to punch out Kiké Hernández and his former teammate Shohei Ohtani to end the inning.
He returned for the sixth and finished his night with an easy 1-2-3 frame — closing his final line with just one walk and three hits allowed while striking out six.
“He was really, really good,” Carlos Mendoza said. “The way he used all of his pitches, I thought he got ahead and executed when he needed to. The fastball was at 97 at one point, he had life on it — the slider was sharp, the changeup had depth. Pretty impressive for him to go out and do what he did against that lineup.”
These are exactly the type of outings the Mets were hoping they’d receive from the former first-round pick when they took a chance on him on a one-year pact this offseason.
Canning has already won as many games as he did all of last season with the Angels and Braves, and he’s down to an extremely impressive 2.90 ERA on the year — good enough for the ninth-lowest in the National League.
He’s also pieced together three quality starts and this is the seventh time he’s allowed one or fewer earned runs.
“He’s been awesome for us,” Mendoza said. “The last two outings with the rain against the Dodgers at home and then the rough one against the White Sox, but overall, we feel really good every time he takes the ball.
“You have to give him credit — he’s been open to the new ideas and the adjustments, whether it’s gripping the baseball and a couple of other things, but it comes down to him going out there and executing the plan.”
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