So have the Mets hit the wall or are the Los Angeles Dodgers this much better?
In truth, it’s probably a little bit of both.
The Dodgers are certainly showcasing themselves in a way that makes them appear to be the best all-around team in baseball, led by a relentless offense and a very deep bullpen.
But for the Mets, it does look like the grueling stretch of games they had to win over the last three weeks has begun to take a toll, as their tired bullpen has sprung leaks and the offense has stopped hitting in the clutch.
As such this series has gotten ugly for them. In the late innings last night Carlos Mendoza had little choice but to have Danny Young, their rarely-used left-hander, pitch the final three innings and give up the last three runs while the Citi Field crowd headed for the exits.
So the final score was 10-2 Thursday night in Game 4 of this NLCS, meaning the Mets are down 3-1 and facing an elimination game at home on Friday.
And while it would be a disservice to this team, after everything they’ve done this season, to say they have no chance at winning three straight games for what would be their most miraculous comeback of them all, they really haven’t offered much reason to believe it’s possible.
After all, in their three losses to LA, they’ve been outscored 27-2. That sounds almost impossible but 9-0, 8-0, and 10-2 add up to a rout in football, never mind postseason baseball.
Indeed, the Dodgers have dominated the Mets in every phase of the game. Even in Game 4 on Thursday, it never really felt like the Mets had much of a shot. It’s an overstatement to say it felt over when Shohei Ohtani led off the game with a monster home run, but not by much.
And surely it felt that way at 5-2 after four innings. By then the Citi Field crowd was subdued, eerily reminiscent of the Wild Card Series against the San Diego Padres in 2022 when elimination seemed inevitable.
Starting pitching seemed to be the one area where the Mets had a clear advantage going into the series, and yet that has proven not to be the case.
Though only Jack Flaherty has gone deep into a game for LA, Walker Buehler in Game 3 and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 4 outpitched the Mets’ starters just long enough for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to turn things over to his deep and talented bullpen.
Obviously, the LA offense had a lot to do with that as well. On Thursday, in fact, forecasts of a tough matchup for Jose Quintana proved to be true, for he needs hitters to chase his off-speed stuff to be effective and the Dodgers again lived up to their reputation as a disciplined lineup that rarely chases pitches out of the strike zone.
So as well as Quintana has pitched for the last several weeks, allowing only two earned runs in his last six starts, he was forced to nibble around the plate, issuing four walks on a night when Mets’ pitchers surrendered nine walks in all.
“That’s a team that controls the strike zone as well as any team in baseball,” Mendoza said afterward. “They forced him to come into the strike zone when he did they made him pay.”
And eventually, that caught up with him, as the Dodgers knocked Quintana out with one out in the third inning, scoring five runs against the left-hander.
It got no better from there.
The Mets’ offense had its chances, but as has been the case in the three losses in the series, just couldn’t get a clutch hit.
Maybe they used them all up in some of those crazy comebacks in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, but they can’t buy one now. On Thursday they went 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position, leaving 12 runners on base.
And so where does all of this leave them?
After Game 3 I thought it was time for Mendoza to shake up the lineup, but he said he was sticking with his guys, but they failed him again. Francisco Alvarez finally got a hit, a single, but it did feel as if Jeff McNeil and Jesse Winker might have helped — especially when Winker hit a hard liner to deep right with the bases loaded as a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning.
Winker’s liner was caught, of course, ending the inning because that’s the way things are going for the Mets in this series.
Now it all feels bigger than making a lineup change here or there. The Mets aren’t about to give up, to be sure. Their fight has been their identity for too long this season and they were still saying all the right things in the clubhouse, but even after that, you got a sense they know the odds are stacked against them in so many ways now.
“We’re gonna do our best to add to this story and make some more magic,’’ Brandon Nimmo said, “but it’s definitely not easy. Nothing that we’ve done really has been. I guess that’s the fitting part of the story.”
It looks like they’re out of magic, finally. Or maybe it’s just that they’re playing the Dodgers.
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