Building momentum after a walk-off win wasn’t difficult to do this week for the San Diego Padres.
The New York Mets hope they finally will be able to say the same thing Friday.
A pair of teams coming off dramatic wins are slated to begin a three-game series Friday night, when the Mets host the Padres in their first clash of the season.
Padres right-hander Matt Waldron (4-5, 3.76 ERA) is scheduled to start against Mets left-hander Sean Manaea (3-3, 4.30).
The Padres were off Thursday after earning a walk-off win for the second straight day Wednesday afternoon, when Jackson Merrill homered with one out in the ninth to lift San Diego to a 5-4 win over the Oakland Athletics and a sweep of the three-game series.
The Mets won the decisive game of a three-game series against the Miami Marlins in walk-off fashion Thursday night, when J.D. Martinez hit a one-out, two-run shot in the ninth inning to lift New York to a 3-2 victory.
Merrill’s homer capped a chaotic two days for the Padres, who squandered a two-run, eighth-inning lead Tuesday night before Kyle Higashioka led off the ninth with a homer to give San Diego a 4-3 victory.
The Padres trailed 4-2 entering the eighth inning on Wednesday before Donovan Solano hit a two-run homer with two outs. Ha-Seong Kim led off the ninth with a groundout before Merrill homered on the first pitch he saw from Mason Miller.
Higashioka and Merrill are the first Padres players to hit walk-off homers in back-to-back games since Marvell Wynne and Bruce Bochy did so against the Cincinnati Reds and Los Angeles Dodgers, respectively, on April 13-14, 1986.
The homer by Merrill also gave the Padres their first sweep of the season.
“We’d already won the series,” Merrill said, “but that wasn’t enough.”
The Mets were no-hit into the sixth inning Thursday and had just two hits entering the ninth before Martinez hit his first career walk-off homer. The walk-off win was the sixth of the season for New York, which has lost its past four games following a walk-off victory.
The Mets haven’t followed a walk-off win with another triumph since April 5, when they beat the Cincinnati Reds 3-2 one day after scoring twice in the ninth inning of a 2-1 win over the Detroit Tigers.
The victory Thursday continued a mini-resurgence for the Mets, who have won eight of 12. New York has the third-worst record in the National League at 30-37 but is just three games out of the final wild-card spot.
“It’s important winning series and now we’ve got a good team coming in here,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said. “We’ve had some tough losses, but the guys continue to show up (and) continue to fight. And today we saw it on a night where it was hard for us offensively. We found a way.”
Waldron earned a win on Saturday when he allowed one run over six innings as the Padres beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 13-1. The rookie has never faced the Mets.
Manaea took a defeat on Saturday after giving up six runs over 3 2/3 innings in the Mets’ 7-2 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies in London. He is 3-1 with a 3.89 ERA in eight career games (six starts) against the Padres, the team Manaea pitched for in 2022.
–Field Level Media
