“He was real good, I mean real good.”

Those the words of Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez in his post-game press conference referring to Noah Syndergaard, the New York Mets pitcher who shut his team down for seven innings in a Mets 7-3 victory.

And shut them down he did. After allowing a single to the pesky Trea Turner to leadoff the game, Syndergaard (10-7) retired the next 16 batters en route to seven shut innings where he allowed only three hits and struck out ten. It was the third time he has struck out ten or more this season and 17th time in his career.

This, after he suffered his worst outing of his career on Wednesday against the Chicago Cubs where he allowed 10 runs (9 earned) on nine hits in three innings. Questions abounded before and even after the game, how his mental status was after such an eruption. Syndergaard told his skipper it was just an aberration.

“I just think it was, ‘I’m not going to let it happen twice,'”manager Mickey Callaway said. “You could see it in his eyes. It felt like that in between starts. He wasn’t happy with what happened the last outing, and he comes out today and steps up huge.”

For Noah’s part he simply told reporters, “It’s just all about how you can have a short-term memory and forget and move on.” And move on he did. Syndergaard was dominant in his outing on Monday, having the Nationals chasing the ball all afternoon. Martinez added, “He got us to chase the ball up. Threw a lot more breaking balls than I’ve seen (him) throw before.”

The Mets have now won three out of four on this six-game road trip with two more to play in our Nation’s capital. They still trail the Cubs by four games for the second wild card as Chicago also won on Monday. It was especially noteworthy because about 15 hours earlier, the Mets were 140 miles to the northeast in Philadelphia, playing in the ESPN Sunday night game and suffering a tough loss. The short rest seemed to have little effect on the team.

Still and all even after his brilliant performance, the attention still focused largely on the Cubs fiasco and how Syndergaard would respond. “When they go that bad, I think you just chalk it up to a bad day,” said Callaway. “He’s a great pitcher and has been on a great roll, so you take that one clunker out and he’s been unbelievable. So I think you just contribute it to a bad day.”

Noah credited his team for keeping him positive. “It’s hard to hold your head high after those outings,” Syndergaard said, “but just the spirit of this team kept us moving forward.”

If you take the clunker out, Syndergaard is 4-2 in nine starts since the All-Star break, logging 61.1 innings with 65 strikeouts to 12 walks and 1.62 ERA. His performance dropped his overall ERA beneath four to 3.97.

After the game, Noah added this:

“I had to find a happy medium in between starts because when you have a start like that, those five days or four days in between are very long, and I just wanted to get out there and work, work, work as much as I could to make sure that never happened again. It was kind of unfortunate to have that horrible of an outing, but you’ve just got to embrace it at the end of it and really see it as a blessing to get better.”

He got better alright because against the Nationals on Monday:

He was good, he was really good.