The way things are going for the Mets these days, it’s only fitting Yasiel Puig arrived at Citi Field carrying one of the hottest bats in baseball.
After going 3-for-4 Tuesday night, Puig pounded his 10th home run of the season Wednesday night, helping the Dodgers to a 4-3 victory over the slumping Mets, who lost despite collecting 13 hits.
Puig, the charismatic outfielder from Cuba, belted a 2-0 offering from Mets starter Jacob deGrom over the left-field wall to lead off the sixth inning. It was a line drive that barely cleared, but gave the Dodgers a 2-0 lead. Hanley Ramirez followed with a solo home run en route to handing the Mets their third straight loss and sixth defeat in seven games.
Puig’s 1-for-3 outing put his batting average at .333 for the season and .408 (31-for-76) over his past 19 games. Puig credits his torrid hitting of late to more discipline at the plate, where he’s trying not to chase as many bad pitches as he did when he first arrived in the major leagues last season. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly commented on Tuesday how Puig is forcing pitchers “to throw him strikes,” and not letting his emotions take over. He is more patient, more mature.
“When you’re facing pitchers with the stuff they have here at the major league level, it’s tough when you swing at balls out of the strike zone,” Puig said through an interpreter. “It’s one of the things I’ve been trying to work on and the success I’ve had in the last month or so hitting strikes has showed up in my numbers.”
He’s still a work in progress. In his first at-bat Wednesday night, Puig waited for his pitch and drilled a line drive to center that was caught by Juan Lagares. But in the fourth inning, he chased a two-strike breaking ball into the dirt and couldn’t hold up his swing. He atoned in the sixth, crushing a belt-high slider for his third homer in his last five games.
“I located down and away to him pretty good on his first two at-bats,” deGrom said of Puig. “On that third one, I fell behind and tried to throw a slider there and just left it over the middle of the plate.”
Puig’s thunder at the plate overshadowed a couple of questionable plays in the outfield during this series. A reckless chance in the home seventh could have been costly. The Mets had Daniel Murphy on first with two outs and the Dodgers protecting a 3-2 lead. David Wright hit a sinking liner to right field, but instead of keeping the ball in front of him and playing it safe, Puig dove for the ball. It bounced in front of him and rolled past, allowing Murphy to motor all the way to third and Wright to second. With the potential go-ahead runs in scoring position, Dodgers reliever Brandon League got Puig off the hook by getting Chris Young to ground out to end the inning.
On Tuesday night, Puig committed another mental lapse, though he said he wasn’t at fault even though he was. Puig jokingly insisted third base coach Lorenzo Bundy and third baseman Juan Uribe were to blame when he forgot the number of outs and fired across the field to third base after catching a fly ball in right field for the third out. Bundy and Uribe confessed they had recently discussed how long it had been since Puig committed a fundamental mistake on the base paths or by missing a cutoff man, forgetting the number of outs in an inning or diving for a ball he shouldn’t have.
“It had been about 10 days where he hadn’t messed up anything,” Bundy said, recalling his conversation with Uribe. “I guess it was our fault. We jinxed him.”
Mattingly doesn’t mind the occasional growing pains, especially when Puig is torching Citi Field.