Luke Weaver was one strike away from ending the Mets’ 12-game losing streak when Brooks Lee reached on an infield hit to the hole at shortstop. That brought up Byron Buxton with the tying run on first.
Buxton, who hit a career-high 35 homers last season in earning his first Silver Slugger, had hit a ball 409 feet off Clay Holmes in the sixth inning to tie the game at 2-2. He also homered on Tuesday off of Nolan McLean.
Weaver went right after him, struck him out on five pitches, with Buxton twice swinging through 94 mph fastballs before ending the game waving at an 87 mph change-up. The 32,665 at Citi Field witnessed the first Met win since April 7 and Weaver was asked in an interview with SNY on the field if he thought about pitching around the Twins’ team leader in home runs.
“Look, people smell fear,” he said. “I’m not the biggest guy in the room, but I ain’t scared of nobody. And that’s the attitude I try to take and if I screw up it’s on me, but at the end of the day, I’m going to sleep at night. And I’m going to feel good about the effort I put in. And I ain’t fearing nobody, you remember that.”
Weaver (2-0) entered the game with the score tied 2-2 in the eighth inning with two men on and walked Ryan Jeffers to load the bases before getting Luke Keaschall to foul out to the catcher. He struck out the side in the ninth.
In the locker room, he addressed the losing streak, the longest by a Mets team in 22 years.
“I don’t want to say there was a lot of weight,” he told reporters. “We already carry a lot of weight. I think we have pushed so hard to just simply try to give everything we can and sometimes that’s just not good enough. It’s a weird way to look at it, but the harder you try a lot of times the more you fail.
“I think it’s just relaxing, understanding what you do well, staying within yourself. And at the end of the day just keep hoping and just keep doing your thing. Look, it was a sigh of relief. We have a lot more games to play. It doesn’t mean that we just now go on a 50-game winning streak, like we still gotta go do our business tomorrow and put in the right work and do all the right things. But today was a great step in the right direction. We won a hard-fought ballgame. It was going to take a game like that to get us going.”
The Mets will try to become the first team to make the playoffs after losing 12 in a row. They enter Thursday tied with the Phillies for the worst record in the National League, 8 1/2 games back of the first-place Braves and six back of the last wild card spot.
“This should just be a reminder that this game humbles you in so many ways individually and as a team,” Weaver said. “It’s not very often where you have such a talented team where everything just doesn’t really click in the right way. It’s quite an impossible feat, but we made it possible. But at the end of the day we’re going to use this as a learning point and hopefully catalyst to the future if I used that phrase right.”
