A record that had stood untouched for a century
Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing spent Monday night doing something no outfield pairing has managed in more than a hundred years of recorded baseball.
The two Mets rookies combined to throw out three San Diego runners at the plate inside the first two innings at Citi Field. According to SNY, no team since at least 1920 had cut down three runners at home that early in a game. New York won 2-1, and the arithmetic is not complicated: without those three assists, the Padres score at least three.
Benge closed the first by gunning down Jake Cronenworth and then Manny Machado, on consecutive singles to right by Ty France and Jackson Merrill. Ewing, in left, ended the second by catching Xander Bogaerts trying to come home on a Cronenworth single. Starter Nolan McLean had put eight men on base across those two innings and gave up a single run. He then settled and went six.
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The defensive rebuild finally shows up
David Stearns spent last winter promising a run-prevention team, and spent the offseason acting on it. The Mets president of baseball operations moved on from Pete Alonso, Brandon Nimmo and Jeff McNeil, three names with real offensive value, on the theory that catching the ball more often was worth the trade-off. It took four months for the argument to make itself.
The numbers now back him up in one narrow area. Benge and Ewing have a combined fielding run value of plus-seven, per Baseball Savant. Only one other player on the roster, catcher Luis Torrens, sits above plus-one. They are hitting too, Benge at .273 and Ewing at .249, a combined .263 that runs 27 points clear of the team average.
“Without those kids on the corner, we don’t win that game,” interim manager Andy Green said. “That game could have spun wildly different without them playing the outfield so well.”
What it costs San Diego
The Padres are 67-59 and hold the last National League wild-card place by a single game over Arizona. They are fourth in the majors with 124 stolen bases and 21st in runs with 536, the lowest total of any team currently in a playoff spot. Aggression on the bases is how they paper over that gap, and on Monday it cost them three times.
“We had three chances to score and they got us for every single one,” manager Craig Stammen said. “Our mentality is to be aggressive on the basepaths, make the other team make a play. Tonight, they made the plays.”
Zac Thornton (3-3, 2.78 ERA) starts the middle game for New York against Robbie Ray (10-7, 3.28), who is 5-2 with a 3.14 ERA in 10 career starts against the Mets.
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