In the end, after nine innings of high-intensity baseball, Game 2 of this Subway Series weekend gave us a classic confrontation of power vs. power, Edwin Diaz vs. Aaron Judge, with the game very much on the line.
Or as Carlos Mendoza put it, “That’s the matchup you pay to see.”
And as it turned out, it was also a matchup that confirmed an important point for the Mets: That is, at his best, Diaz is still as dominant as anybody in the game in the ninth inning, as he proved by winning a seven-pitch battle with Judge as the final hitter of the game.
Indeed, Diaz dialed up his fastball up to 100 mph on pitch five and finally 98 at the shoulders with the count full for the swinging strikeout to finish off a 3-2 win over the Yankees in the Bronx.
“That was fun,” Diaz said with a smile in the Mets’ clubhouse. “The way I’m feeling, I can make my pitches and still have fun.”
It seemed all the more significant because Diaz has had some shaky moments this season. He is 10-for-10 now in save situations, but early in the season, especially, he struggled with his fastball command and his velocity was down at times as well.
On Saturday, Diaz admitted he was concerned enough by some of his outings in April to put in some work on his mechanics with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner that he believes is paying off now.
“At the end of April, I fixed a couple of things with my mechanics,” he said. “I was missing a lot with my fastball to the arm side, and we worked on getting me to throw straight to the batter.”
Soon enough, he started seeing results with the fastball, commanding it well enough to make his slider that much more effective. Diaz said it’s made him feel completely confident again.
“Now I’m doing whatever I want on the mound,” was the way he put it.
It looked that way, especially against Judge. Diaz got ahead 0-2 with good sliders, then tried to get Judge to bite on two more sliders off the plate, as the count went to 2-2.
At that point, he cranked up the fastball to 100 and Judge couldn’t catch up, fouling it off. When Judge wouldn’t bite on a 2-2 slider down-and-away, Diaz decided he was going to challenge him once more with the fastball.
Just not recklessly.
Judge may have been having a rare rough day, finishing 0-for-5 with three strikeouts, but he’s still the best and most dangerous hitter in baseball, and Diaz was well aware.
“I was going to go up with the fastball,” he said. “In that whole at-bat, I wasn’t going to make a mistake in the zone. If I was going to miss location, I was going to make sure I missed out of the zone.”
“Better to walk him than give up a bomb?” I asked Diaz.
“I wasn’t going to give up a bomb,” he said with a smile. “I was making my pitches. If I didn’t get swings [out of the zone], I felt good about facing [Cody] Bellinger.”
Maybe on another day, Judge would have taken that 3-2 pitch and, indeed, Diaz would have had to get Bellinger for the final out. Judge didn’t look like himself, to be sure, but give credit to the Mets for pitching him tough and aggressively, especially starter Griffin Canning, who got Judge the first three times, with a routine fly out, a strikeout, and a weak ground ball to third.
This year, teams have often paid a heavy price for being too bold with Judge, who is still hitting .402 even after his 0-for-5. But on this day, the Mets lived to tell about not backing down from him.
“We know how good Judgie is,” said Mendoza, the former bench coach of the Yankees. “But our guys did a great job of attacking him and we got results.”
In a lot of ways, it was the difference in a well-pitched game that featured important plays at the plate for both sides, in what felt like the frenzied atmosphere of a postseason game.
“That was a big league game with big league intensity,” Mendoza said.
After two straight losses and a week of mostly futility at the plate, the Mets needed the win. More than anything, they needed somebody to deliver in the clutch after all of their struggles lately with runners in scoring position.
That turned out to be Francisco Lindor in the Mets’ rally in the ninth that broke a 2-2 tie. Facing reliever Fernando Cruz, they loaded the bases with one out on a walk to Luis Torrens, a single by Brett Baty, and a hit-by-pitch to Tyrone Taylor.
Up came Lindor in an RISP spot, the kind that Mendoza said before Saturday’s game he felt his players chased way too much on Friday night against the Yankees, and in general lately.
“We’ve got to change that,” Mendoza said.
Lindor must have been listening. He was patient, taking close pitches as the count went to 3-0, and then after taking a strike, delivering with a good situational approach to get a fly ball to left-center that scored pinch-runner Luisangel Acuña with the go-ahead run.
The rest was up to Diaz. Three outs later, finishing in grand style against Judge, he gave the Mets reason to believe they still have one of the best closers in baseball.
