Terry Collins doesn’t care for interleague play, and now the Mets manager has another reason not to:
Angels closer Jordan Walden.
After a crushing defeat in Atlanta on Thursday, the Mets had a chance to get one back last night in the bottom of the ninth when Jose Reyes and Justin Turner started the inning with walks. But the hard-throwing Walden came back to strike out Carlos Beltran, Daniel Murphy and Jose Pagan as the Mets fell 4-3 at Citi Field.
“He started wild and found his rhythm,” said Pagan, who waved at an 80-mph slider to end the game, one pitch after seeing a 99-mph fastball. “You want to foul it off, at least. When he’s throwing 100 mph, you just try to stay alive.”
But Pagan, like Beltran and Murphy before him, wasn’t able to, as the Mets dropped their second straight since getting back to .500.
And this was another tough one, after blowing a ninth-inning lead in Atlanta on Thursday.
“That’s the nature of the beast,” Collins said of the close losses. “It’s tough.”
Especially when Reyes is 180 feet away from scoring the tying run.
“I wasn’t picking up the breaking balls out of the pitcher’s hands,” Beltran said. “He’s got a funky motion. It looks like he’s jumping from the mound towards you. When you haven’t seen a guy, you don’t know how his pitches break or the look of his fastball.”
The Mets wound up falling behind for good in the sixth, when the Angels went up 3-2 on a Peter Bourjos double to left that drove in Howard Kendrick.
But in the fourth, Chris Capuano had a chance to help his cause with runners on first and second and no one out, but he failed to get a bunt down and the Mets didn’t score.
It was the latest miscue that has struck the Mets in recent days.
“We talk about execution all the time,” said Capuano, who fell to 5-7. “But we haven’t been doing it lately.”
He wasn’t alone, as the Mets went 3-for-16 with runners in scoring position.
Bobby Parnell gave up a run in the seventh that proved to be costly, especially after Ronny Paulino — who had been robbed by Bourjos of a double earlier — doubled in Jason Bay to make it 4-3 in the eighth.
But that was as close as the Mets got, as they opened the first of 15 straight games against American League teams. After the Angels, the Mets face the Athletics, Rangers, Tigers and Yankees.
“I think it’s really important that we play the Yankees,” Collins said before the game. “It’s great for baseball to have rivalries. But I’m not a big fan of interleague play. I’m sure if you took a poll of managers, like [Detroit’s] Jim Leyland said a few weeks ago, it’s run its course.”
While he noted the different rules for each league as one of the reasons, Collins also pointed to the inequality of the schedule.
“Not everyone in the same division plays the same interleague teams,” Collins said. “We’ve got Texas and Detroit, first-place clubs. I’m not sure everyone is going to play them.”
For now, though, they are playing the third-place Angels and even that didn’t go well. And considering this next stretch, the Mets need to figure out a way to beat some of them.