NEW YORK — After three straight solid starts to begin the year, Marcus Stroman faltered on Saturday against the Nationals, resulting in his first loss of the season.
Stroman (3-1, 2.25 ERA) allowed five runs, four earned, on eight hits with two walks in the Mets’ 7-1 loss to the Nationals at Citi Field. He pitched only four innings, making for his shortest outing since Sept. 7, 2019 against the Phillies.
The ground-ball pitcher never seemed to settle into a rhythm, though his defense didn’t exactly help him find a groove. Stroman allowed at least one run in each of his four innings, including an RBI single to the opposing pitcher, Joe Ross, in the second. The lopsided start came after one of his best outings as a Met, when he hurled eight innings of one-run ball in Colorado last weekend. But on Saturday, Stroman failed to receive help from his right fielder on the first play of the game, which made for a stressful situation just two pitches into the game.
Josh Harrison, leading off the first inning, ripped a single into right that should’ve kept him on first base. But Michael Conforto misplayed the hop, and the ball trickled all the way back to the wall. By the time Conforto retrieved it, Harrison reached third base on the error. The next batter drove in Harrison on a sacrifice fly, and just like that, four pitches into Stroman’s start, the Mets were trailing the Nats.
The Mets’ mishaps on routine fundamentals continued to hurt them.
In the second inning, Conforto made a bad throw to home plate from shallow right field that allowed another Nationals run to score. Had Conforto fired a stronger throw that didn’t take two hops to the reach catcher James McCann, the runner likely would have been out at the plate. To lead off the third, Yadiel Hernandez sent a line drive into left that Dominic Smith slid for, but he couldn’t come up with the catch.
The Nationals’ five-run lead after four innings was a gap the Mets never even came close to closing, though they had many opportunities.
Conforto, perhaps making up for his error, blasted a solo home run that clanked off the right-field foul pole in the bottom of the fourth inning. It was Conforto’s first dinger of the season and the 119th of his career, passing Ed Kranepool for 11th on the Mets’ all-time list.
Nats’ righty Ross held the Mets’ bats, which have been slow to start so far this season, to just five hits over six innings. The Mets' unfortunate trend of stranding runners on base continued Saturday as the offense went 0 for 3 with runners in scoring position and left seven men on base.
Stephen Tarpley, who was called up from the Mets’ alternate site on Friday after Joey Lucchesi was optioned, allowed all four of his batters to reach base via hits, a walk and a hit-by-pitch in the fifth. Encouragingly, Robert Gsellman pitched three scoreless innings with one walk and two strikeouts after he took the ball from Tarpley.
