Nationals manager Matt Williams came away from their opening series very impressed with the Mets.
“Right now we’re chasing the Mets, so I’ll tell you that,” Williams said, according to Maria Guardado of the Star Ledger. “They’re 2-1, we’re 1-2. They’re a really good team. They do a lot of things well in the baseball field.”
Williams believes the Mets have a very solid roster and are strong in most aspects of the game.
“They’re balanced offensively, their starting pitching is really good,” Williams explained. “They had a loss at the back of their bullpen, but they’ve got somebody to step in and do that job. They’ve got good lefty matchups and guys that can fill the middle and can put in multiple innings for them, so they play the game well.”
Those are some very kind words from the skipper of the Mets most challenging rival.
It’s really early – there are still 159 games to go. So I don’t want to go too crazy over a three-game series in the beginning of April. But it’s hard not to be impressed with what the Mets displayed over the first three games, especially against a team clearly aiming for a World Championship.
Simply put, they just executed better than the Nationals. Yes, the two games are arguably on Ian Desmond and his three errors at shortstop, but it’s not as if the Nationals were able to stop the bleeding, either, and that was with Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg on the mound for them.
On the flip side, while essentially matching the Nationals pound-for-pound on the mound, the Mets made the plays when they needed to, took advantage of Washington’s mistakes, got some excellent clutch hitting from key players.
“You can’t keep giving good teams outs,” Terry Collins said on Monday. “And we think we’re a good team.”
Again, it’s all about the little things in these games, and the Mets executed the little things, like good teams do.
Just Mets 