Dodgers Play the Long Game as Mets Avoid Elimination

NEW YORK — Less than 20 minutes before what might have been the final game of the year at Citi Field, the OMG Mets introduced one more good-vibes gimmick. Five, actually.

The Temptations, the legendary Motown band, took the field behind home plate dressed in their signature suits and sang the National Anthem. Moments later, the quintet donned Mets jerseys and performed “My Girl,” their classic song that is played here whenever Francisco Lindor steps to the plate. If the Mets were going to be eliminated in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, at least they’d go down singing.

Turns out, the Temptations were just the opening act for a three-hour rock revival. When it was over, the Mets had blown out the Dodgers, 12-6, and ensured that their remarkable run would continue for at least another game.

“We’ve played with our backs against the wall the whole year, and we’ve been able to rise to the occasion,” left fielder Brandon Nimmo said. “Some might say we’re at our best at that time. If anybody can do it, we can do it.”

By “do it,” Nimmo means win Games 6 and 7 at Dodger Stadium to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the series and advance to the World Series. It won’t be easy, but it’s also not all that hard to imagine a world in which the Mets pull this off.

At first, it looked like they wouldn’t get the chance to try. Leading off the game against lefty David Peterson, Shohei Ohtani singled up the middle just past a lunging Jeff McNeil, who was making his first start of the postseason. Mookie Betts then lined a sinker into the right-center field gap, where it was run down by a sliding Starling Marte. Except, the ball deflected off the top of the webbing of his glove and landed for a double. Second and third, nobody out.

The next batter, Teoscar Hernández, attacked the first pitch he saw, and scorched a grounder to Lindor, who backhanded it and fired to first. His throw was high and toward the home-plate side of the base. With Hernández barreling toward him, Pete Alonso shuffled across the bag, stretched his left leg into foul territory with his right foot touching the base, and reached for the ball. The grounder was hit too hard to score Ohtani from third, so he stayed put. Instead of a run-scoring throwing error from one of the game’s premiere defenders, the play went down as a routine 6-3 putout. From there, the Mets settled in. Peterson got Freddie Freeman to line out softly to first and struck out Tommy Edman to escape the two-on, no-out jam without allowing a run.

The Mets jumped on Jack Flaherty as quickly as the Dodgers did Peterson. Lindor laced a single to right field and Nimmo walked. Third baseman Mark Vientos skied a deep fly to left field for the first out to bring up Alonso, who entered the game 2-for-15 in the NLCS after raking through the first two rounds of the postseason.

Alonso is a free agent after the season, and if this ends up being his final home game with the Mets, it sure was a fitting way for him to go out.

He took a first-pitch slider from Flaherty for strike one, and then spat on one in the dirt to even the count. Flaherty then missed inside with a fastball before going back to the slider. His 2-1 offering was never a strike out of his hand and broke well below the zone. No matter. Alonso unloaded on the pitch, sending it 432 feet just to the right of dead center field for a three-run homer. Or, as Jesse Winker recalled: “Pete hit a ball off the ground into the apple, so that was pretty sick.”

You know, it was pretty sick. This is not what you’d call a hittable pitch. Alonso chalked it up to “the magic of the postseason.” But it was also the mark of a great hitter, one who prepared for his opponent and knew how he might be pitched. Alonso said he was looking for something over the middle of the plate and that he didn’t realize how low it was until after he’d deposited it into the center field seats.

“Pete’s a really good hitter,” Winker said. “Pete’s a smart hitter. Pete has well over 200 home runs. Pete knows what he’s doing. Pete knows how to hit, and Pete knows how to hit for power. I feel like Pete had an idea of how he was gonna get attacked, especially with guys on base, and Pete capitalized on it. Pete’s done this for a really long time for a reason.”

The Dodgers answered with a run in the second, as Enrique Hernández led off the inning with a walk, advanced to third on Andy Pages’ two-out single, and scored on a wild pitch. But Peterson avoided further trouble by getting Betts to pop out with Ohtani on first.

It was clear from the beginning that Flaherty didn’t have the same stuff he did when he dominated the Mets over seven scoreless innings in Game 1. His four-seam velocity was down two miles per hour, he wasn’t getting whiffs, and pretty much everything the Mets put in play was hit hard. After the game, Dave Roberts said Flaherty was “under the weather a little bit.”

Even so, Roberts abandoned the urgency with which he’s managed throughout this postseason and let Flaherty return to the mound for the third inning. He walked the first two batters he faced, Alonso and Winker, and then Marte doubled into the left-field corner to plate two more runs. Still, Roberts stuck with Flaherty. At that point, the score was 5-1, and with a bullpen game looming on Sunday, Roberts didn’t want to use his high-leverage relievers so early in a four-run game. In riding this lesser, sicker version of Flaherty for a little while longer, Roberts was essentially conceding the game and hoping to put his team in the best position possible to win one of the remaining two games in Los Angeles.

The problem with this strategy is that the Mets were not in a great position with their pitching either. Peterson wasn’t pitching all that well, and the Dodgers certainly have a good enough offense to get to the underbelly of New York’s bullpen. A four-run deficit in the third inning shouldn’t have been too much for Los Angeles to overcome. However, with a flailing Flaherty still on the mound, it didn’t stay a four-run game for long.

Francisco Alvarez drove home Marte with a two-out single to bring up Lindor, who dropped his bat head and hammered a low-and-inside knuckle-curve into the right field corner. Betts misplayed the carom, trying to bare hand the ball off the wall and get it back into the infield quicker. Instead, he bobbled it, and by the time he recovered, Alvarez had scored from first and Lindor was cruising into third with what was deemed to be a triple by a generous official scorer. Lindor scored the fifth run of the inning on a Nimmo single before Vientos mercifully made the third out.

Peterson hit a wall with two outs in the fourth. First, he allowed a solo shot to Pages. Then Ohtani singled and Betts and Teoscar Hernández walked to load the bases. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza brought in Reed Garrett to face Freeman, who worked the count full before clipping the outside corner with a backdoor sweeper to get out of trouble.

Brent Honeywell relieved Flaherty to start the fourth inning and hit Alonso with his second pitch. Winker then shot a groundball past a diving Freeman that went all the way to the wall for an RBI triple. McNeil drove in Winker with a sac fly to extend the Mets’ lead to 10-2.

The Dodgers didn’t roll over, though. With two on and two out in the fifth, Pages smacked his second home run in as many innings to make it a 10-5 game. Betts homered to lead off the sixth and cut the New York lead to four. The Mets tacked on two more runs against Honeywell, who was finally relieved with two outs in the eighth. His overall line — 4 2/3 innings, six hits, four runs — was far from impressive, but his main job wasn’t to prevent runs but to give the Dodgers length so Roberts could rest the remainder of his bullpen.

“I wish I could predict Andy’s going to hit two homers tonight,” Roberts said. “It’s not always fun when you’re going through it, certainly from anyone’s chair, certainly my chair. But you have to remain steadfast in how you use your pitchers because ultimately it’s about winning four games in a seven-game series.”