The Mets are starting to look like what truly great teams look like.
The Amazin’s beat the brakes off the Washington Nationals, a wildly inferior team, for the second night in a row. There was no playing down to the competition, no going through the motions as they hosted a last-place squad, and no drama whatsoever. The Mets won 10-0 on Tuesday, the second night in a row that they cleared the double-digit run hurdle.
“It’s special right now,” said starting pitcher Trevor Williams, who got the win. “I’m going to ask Buck (Showalter) tomorrow to see if I can hit leadoff.”
When Eduardo Escobar’s sixth inning homer supplied the ninth and 10th runs, fans in the upper deck removed their shirts and waved them around in a manner that would make Petey Pablo proud. This team is finally playing at a level — and consistently, at that — that their fans have been clamoring for. Each run of the Nationals series, during which the Mets have outscored the woeful Washington team 23-5, has been a ruthless display of what happens when talented, motivated players are all pulling on the same rope.
The Mets haven’t just been beating the Nationals, they’ve been embarrassing them. In their nine games against D.C. this season, the Mets have seven wins and have outscored their division rivals 53-24. On Tuesday they racked up 17 hits and did not relent once the Nationals went to their bullpen. Another sign of a hungry team, the Mets do not take their foot off the gas once they’ve pulled away.
“They have confidence in their approach,” Showalter said of the Mets’ hitters. “You’re only as good as your last at-bat and your last game. They have a lot of respect for how good the players are at this level and how quickly things can go from the penthouse to the outhouse. I respect that mentality they have.”
Watching them for the last two nights — and yes, they’ve been playing one of the National League’s most hopeless teams — has been a showcase of what this team is capable of. They won both games despite not having any of their top pitchers starting. They shut down the other team’s best player, another hallmark of greatness, by keeping Juan Soto to one hit in nine plate appearances. They also jumped all over bad pitching, and while the real test will be their performances against the game’s elite, the Mets have definitively proven that they don’t get punked by pitchers who are trying to punch above their weight class.
Patrick Corbin got the ball for the Nats on Tuesday. Corbin, a left-handed pitcher in his 10th year, has fallen on hard times in the last two years, and headed into his start at Citi Field with the highest ERA of any qualified starter in the league. That 6.30 ERA went up to 6.96 after Corbin turned in another clunker.
Starling Marte started it off for the Mets with a two-run dong in the first. Then Luis Guillorme slapped a two-out single for two more runs in the third. Corbin got knocked out of the game in the fifth inning, but not after three more runs he was responsible for had glided home.
Marte and Guillorme have both been on tears recently. Coming into the game, Marte was hitting .347 in May with three homers, seven doubles and two triples in 22 games. Guillorme has straight up been one of the hardest hitters to retire in all of Major League Baseball. He came into Tuesday’s game having made 61 plate appearances in the month of May, reaching base in 33 of them. The duo was a combined 3-for-10 with four RBI.
The idea of what the Mets could look like when they get all their players back from injury is a cause for salivation. Right now, they are a force, and Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer have yet to be on the active roster together, giving what has so far been a well-oiled machine two major hardware upgrades at some point.
When the customary playing of “Lazy Mary” oozed out of the stadium’s speakers during the seventh inning stretch, Citi Field turned into the type of celebration that is usually reserved for weddings or birthdays. People danced, sung and allowed themselves to feel unbridled joy, a truly wild concept for anyone who’s been exposed to the team’s specific brand of misery over the years.
“We’re deep, we trust in one another, and there’s a lot of vibing,” Mark Canha said. “We understand our identity and what makes us great. We’re staying true to that.”
The Mets had already done their part to provide an obvious, commanding, and above all else, wall-to-wall fun victory. They have a chance to go for a sweep on Wednesday.
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