This loss didn't hand the Mets a signature win, and it didn't move the NL West race an inch. The Dodgers still left Citi Field having won the series, capping a road trip where they took all three series they played and went 6-3 overall. Nothing about Sunday changes the fact that Los Angeles has the best record in baseball and a comfortable division cushion.
But this was exactly the kind of game that should worry a defending-champion bullpen more than the record book will admit. The Dodgers took a 3-1 lead into the sixth. Jack Dreyer came in and walked two hitters while getting just one out. Evan Phillips followed and grooved a 1-1 sinker to Tyrone Taylor, who deposited it into the left-field seats for a three-run homer that flipped a comfortable lead into a deficit. Marcus Semien piled on with a three-run shot of his own in the seventh, and a game the Dodgers had controlled for five innings turned into an 8-3 blowout the other way.
Think about who did this to them. The Mets entered Sunday at 43-62, fifth in the NL East, in the middle of an expected sell-off, with starter Freddy Peralta possibly making his last start in a Mets uniform before an anticipated trade. New York had lost five straight at home before Sunday and had won only a handful of games at Citi Field over a longer recent stretch. This isn't a team playing playoff baseball, and it still cracked the Dodgers' bullpen wide open in one bad inning.
If Dreyer and Phillips can get hit this easily by a team that's waving the white flag on its season, that's a real red flag for October, not a July blip you shrug off. The front-line arms in that bullpen have been fine. The trouble is the innings between the starter and the ninth, where the Dodgers keep finding soft spots, and a last-place club just proved it again.
The lineup didn't help matters either. Freddie Freeman had an RBI double, but as a team the Dodgers went 2 for 13 with runners in scoring position. You can survive that against a contender if your bullpen holds. You can't survive it when your bullpen caves too.
Credit the Mets for a day, especially Semien, who hit his homer just over a week removed from a strained hip issue, a small sign of life in a lineup that's clearly missing its best player right now. But don't oversell one afternoon from a team about to spend the next several days shopping its rotation and its trade chips before the deadline. Sunday will be forgotten in New York the moment Peralta gets moved. For the Dodgers, it should stick around a little longer than that.
