Kyle Tucker turned down the Mets in free agency, took the Dodgers' money instead, and now he's spending his weekends hitting baseballs over the right-field foul pole against the team he snubbed in free agency. He went deep again on July 25, his second straight game with a home run, this one off a 2-2 fastball from Nolan McLean that started the Dodgers' scoring in a 4-3 win at Citi Field. It's more than a good week for Tucker. It's a running reminder to a fan base of exactly what it passed on, one swing at a time.
This game wasn't about Los Angeles playing great baseball. It was about New York continuing to come apart. The Dodgers won on the back of two Mets defensive mistakes: a throwing error by Brett Baty that led to a run driven in by Andy Pages' groundout, and a passed ball charged to Francisco Alvarez—his eighth of the season, tops in the National League—that brought home another run. None of that required the Mets to be at their best. They weren't.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto got the win, though by his recent standard it was a pedestrian outing. He allowed just one run over six innings Saturday, pitching around traffic most of the night. That might be the more unsettling sign for anyone chasing the Dodgers: even when their ace isn't sharp, this team finds a way to win. That's a dangerous quality to have in late July.
The Mets, who were mired in last place in the NL East at 43-60 heading into that series and kept sliding afterward, also learned Juan Soto is headed to the injured list with a strained calf, and just how long he'll be out is still an open question—the club and Soto himself have offered different timelines. Soto's .947 OPS was the highest among all NL players this season before he went down. Losing that bat for an uncertain stretch, while your defense keeps handing free bases to a Dodgers team that, as of that series, had won four straight and improved to 5-0 against the Mets on the season, is not a
