Washington Nationals at New York Mets

Andrew Alvarez took the ball for the Nationals at 7:10 PM ET carrying a 3.51 ERA and some momentum off a clean turn against Cincinnati, while Robert Stock got the nod for the Mets looking to bounce back from the worst start of his comeback season. Neither pitcher had much room for error given how each offense had been trending, and it showed early — this one stayed scoreless into the third.

Washington's lone run came in the top of the third, and for a while that looked like it might be enough behind Alvarez, who's quietly been one of the more reliable arms in a rotation that's dealt with a wave of injuries this year. The bigger question all night was how thin the lineup around him looked without James Wood, whose oblique strain has kept him out well past his original eligibility date. On the other side, Stock was working with a Mets bullpen that's been stretched since Devin Williams and Cionel Perez both landed on the injured list, which made every extra pitch from Stock matter more than usual.

New York finally cashed in with single runs in the sixth and seventh, the kind of incremental damage that doesn't show up flashy on a box score but adds up fast against a team already missing its best power bat. It was enough to flip a game that had the shape of a low-scoring pitchers' duel into a clean 4-1 win, and it snapped Washington's momentum right as they were starting to find some.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
WSH	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	5	0
NYM	0	0	0	0	0	2	2	0	—	4	7	1

The absences tell a lot of the story here. Wood's oblique has been described as mild since he first went down, but interim decisions to hold him even after he became eligible left Washington's outfield light on thump all night. Juan Soto's calf strain and Mark Vientos' broken hand have done similar damage to the Mets' lineup for weeks now, which made Friday's win — with the offense they had available — a genuinely encouraging sign for a club that's lost 2 straight coming in.

Washington still enters most nights the more complete team on paper, and the record backs that up. But road trips against a desperate Mets club playing loose under Andy Green have a way of getting weird, and Friday was a reminder that a last-place team can still be dangerous when its bullpen holds and its bats find just enough.

For Washington, it's a shrug-it-off loss in a season that's already had plenty of ups and downs — Alvarez did his job, the offense just didn't finish it. For the Mets, a win like this, scraped together with a patchwork lineup and a shorthanded bullpen, is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a rough year from feeling like a total loss.

Sources