Tucker, Pages Bury Mets Early; NYM Eighth-Inning Rally Falls Short
Los Angeles built a 4-0 lead through five innings and survived a two-run Mets rally in the eighth to win 4-3 on Saturday. The story of the night was a chaotic third inning that handed the Dodgers three runs — two of them on passed balls.
Kyle Tucker got Los Angeles on the board first, launching a 392-foot homer to right in the third inning to make it 1-0. The inning didn't stop there. Andy Pages grounded into a fielder's choice that scored Rushing, pushing the lead to 2-0, and then Alvarez let two passed balls get by him — Pages scored on the first, making it 3-0, with Freeman advancing to second on the same miscue. That's three runs in one inning, two of them gifted by the catcher, and it looks like that sequence of errors effectively decided the game before New York could settle in.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto did his part to protect that cushion, working 6.0 innings and allowing just 1 earned run on 5 hits with 5 strikeouts. Nolan McLean matched the six-inning frame for the Mets, but surrendered 7 hits and 2 earned runs while striking out 7 — solid enough on paper, but the passed-ball damage wasn't his to absorb. Pages added an insurance run in the fifth, singling to right to score Hernandez and push the lead to 4-0. Freddie Freeman went 3-for-4 on the night, a quietly dominant performance that appears to have kept multiple Dodgers rallies alive even when they didn't convert.
New York made things interesting late. Bichette singled home a run in the fifth to get the Mets on the board at 4-1, and then came the biggest moment of the game: in the eighth, Tyrone Taylor doubled to left, scoring Robert Jr. and Benge to cut the deficit to 4-3. That swing moved New York's win probability from 7% to 24% — a real pulse, but not enough. Brock Stewart closed it out with a clean ninth, striking out two on zero hits. Daniel Duarte had thrown two scoreless innings of relief for the Mets before Taylor's double, so the bullpen arms were working — the Dodgers' early cushion just proved too much to fully erase. Taylor finished 1-for-1 with 2 RBI, and Bichette went 2-for-5 with an RBI, but New York ran out of innings to complete the comeback.