It took David Wright 12 years to get to the World Series and in his first game in the Fall Classic he’d be the first to tell you he had a pretty rough night.
Sure, Wright went 2-for-7 with two singles at the plate, but those other at-bats were pretty ugly and two in particular were painful to watch as well.
The Mets captain struck out looking against Edinson Volquez with two runners on to end the third, and then struck out swinging against Ryan Madson with two runners on to end the 11th. Ouch.
The Mets stranded 11 runners on base last night and Wright accounted for four of them.
Additionally, he erased one of his two singles by attempting a steal of second against the cannon-armed catcher Salvador Perez, who easily gunned him down in the ninth.
However, it was his crucial throwing error in the 14th inning of Game 1 that would prove to be the back-breaker for the Mets as the Royals took advantage and won the contest 5-4.
After clumsily fielding a hot grounder by leadoff man Alcides Escobar, his throw pulled Lucas Duda off first base and put the speedster on for the Royals. Escobar eventually came racing home on an Eric Hosmer walk-off sac fly to end the grueling extra-inning affair.
“I just got an in-between hop,” Wright later said. “The ball kind of came up on me, and I just couldn’t put the glove on it. It hit my wrist and then got me in the midsection. I know he can run, so I rushed the throw a little bit.”
To be fair, Wright also had a couple of sparkling defensive gems in the game. But it was his final defensive play in the 14th that would prove to be the fatal flaw in last night’s Game 1 loss for the Mets.
“It’s obviously a tough one to swallow. But once we leave the ballpark tonight, we need to forget about it and start focusing on tomorrow’s game, because coming into this we knew these guys are an excellent opponent. And we knew it wasn’t going to be easy. So these are the types of hurdles we’re going to have to clear if we expect to win this thing.”
“If we can take some positives out of today,” Wright said. “We were one hit away or one play away from winning that game.”
He’s absolutely right about that, it was a very tight, hard fought battle from the first pitch to the last. But as we pointed out before the game, the keys to beating the Kansas City Royals was going to be not giving them any extra outs, and playing clean, crisp baseball on our end. That didn’t happen… Let’s get them tonight.
