Happy Christian Scott Home Debut Day!
The Mets look to rebound after Friday’ night’s loss to the Braves with Christian Scott making his Citi Field debut this afternoon at Citi Field. The Mets got last Friday’s game in after about an hour of delays and the Mets offense spent most of the night looking like they haven’t played in days. Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso powered the offense but overall the team fell short 4-2.
Christian Scott looked electric in his debut last weekend where he held the Rays to one run from five hits and a walk over 6 2/3 innings while striking out six. He tossed 94 pitches, 67 of them for strikes. The Rays are a much more free swinging team than the Atlanta Braves, and today may be the toughest lineup that he faces all season. We’ll see if the Braves approach him differently at the plate after seeing the tape of what he did to the Rays lineup.
The Mets bats started to heat up late in Friday’s game, hopefully that’s a sign they’ll be ready for Max Fried this afternoon. Over seven starts Fried has pitched 38 1/3 innings with a 4.23 ERA, 4.09 FIP, 1.148 WHIP and a 98 ERA+. Fried had a tremendous end of April where he tossed a complete game shutout against the Marlins and followed it up with shutting the Mariners out over six innings. His last time out though the Dodgers tagged him for four runs over seven innings. His season stats are still heavily impacted by his second start of the season where he allowed eight runs, seven earned over 4 1/3 against the Diamondbacks. The Mets have the following career numbers against Fried:
- Pete Alonso 10-34, 2B, 2 HR, 5 BB, 12 K
- Harrison Bader 2-9, BB, 4 K
- Brett Baty 2-5, K
- Francisco Lindor 3-25, HR, 6 K
- Starling Mart 4-18, 2 2B, BB, 4 K
- Jeff McNeil 10-28, 3 2B, BB, 5 K
- Tomás Nido 3-12, 2 2B, K
- Brandon Nimmo 3-26, 2 2B, 4 BB, 11 K
- Tyrone Taylor 2-6, 2 K
- Joey Wendle 0-4
Three Things To Watch For:
- Lindor is slugging now! Since April 28th Lindor has 10 hits in 44 trips to the plate. Six of his ten hits have been for extra bases. Three of them have been doubles, three of them have been homeruns. Five of his seven homeruns this season have come in his last 14 games played (or in other words he had two homeruns in his first 23 games played this season).
- Back-to-back multi-hit games for Pete. Pete Alonso was in the midst of a long slump before this week. In his last two games he has gone 4-for-9 at the plate with two doubles, a homerun, and two runs scored. This feels like Pete Alonso breaking out of his slump.
- The bullpen is well rested. The Mets bullpen has essentially had three days off in a row with Yohan Ramírez and Adrian Houser taking care of business Friday night. Yohan was recently reacquired by the Mets and Houser was just bumped to the bullpen. Both tossed two scoreless innings. If both pitchers can continue to be successful in long relief, this will allow the Mets to pivot and use Reed Garrett in higher leverage situations.
Let’s Go Mets!
