When things are going right, Francisco Lindor likes to say the thing to do is to “keep riding the good wave.” After the Mets dropped their 10th game out of the last 11 on Tuesday night, letting a 3-0 lead after five frames turn into a 7-4 defeat to the Atlanta Braves, the hope is that this bad wave has finally crashed.
“Keep on grinding, keep on grinding. We gotta find a way to beat the team on the other side,” Lindor said when asked what the club has to do to pull out of the recent wipeout. “We have to stay together, we have to fight for each other, and just put our heads down and find a way.”
Just as quickly as a six-game winning streak can turn into a seven-game losing skid, there is a belief that the next wave is around the corner.
“We’re one week away from looking completely different," Lindor said. "At the end of the day, I believe in what we have here, the guys are gonna continue to stay together, they’re gonna continue to fight, continue to play for each other.
“What do we have to do to get out of something like this? Fight for each other, fight for each other. Turn the page, day in and day out. When we win, turn the page. When we lose, turn the page.”
In Tuesday’s defeat, Lindor went 0-for-5 with two strikeouts, including grounding out weakly to second base for the game’s final out, representing the tying run with two men in scoring position. The shortstop snapped a run of three straight two-hit games, and he now has just six hits in his last 36 at-bats (.167) with nine strikeouts and two walks.
“I gotta get better,” Lindor said, adding, “I have felt good the past couple games, probably the past four or five days. Today’s just one of those nights. I gotta get good pitches to hit and when I get ‘em drive ‘em. And today I didn’t do that. “I felt like I got a couple of pitches to hit in that last at-bat and I didn’t come through.
"The bottom of the lineup today did a fantastic job of working together to get some runs. The top of the lineup, the leadoff guy, it came down to me, and I didn't execute. That's [the] bottom line.”
With the team scuffling in all phases of the game – pitching, hitting, defense, baserunning – Lindor said there is some frustration in the clubhouse, they are professionals who “understand the task” at hand.
“There’s definitely some frustration, of course, as competitors and professional athletes, yeah, you don’t want to lose,” he said. “But the guys understand that, to get out of where we are today, we gotta do it together. We have a really good group of guys.”
“…I do feel a sense of urgency of like, ‘Alright guys, we gotta do this and we’re gonna have to do this together.’”
Of course, in the results industry of big league baseball, Lindor knows that, “It’s all about winning. Nothing else matters but winning. And we’re not doing that right now.”
Last season, the Mets stumbled out of the gate and struggled for the season’s early goings and looked lost at sea after a 22-33 start. Lindor said that experience gives them some measure of perspective, but this clubhouse is inhabited by a different team.
“We have a lot of guys that were here last year, but at the end of the day, we don’t really care what happened last year,” he said. “Yes, we all understand in this room that we’re gonna go through things like this. We gotta learn from it, we gotta play better, ultimately that’s what it comes down to. We have to play better, I have to play better.”
Lindor added that in understanding this is a tough moment, the players must “rely on each other and put our heads down and just work.”
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