Mets centerfielder Harrison Bader exited Tuesday night’s extra-inning win against the Washington Nationals at the start of the bottom of the fourth inning after crashing into the outfield fence.
The Mets announced Bader left the game "for precautionary reasons." The club did not announce a specific injury.
Carlos Mendoza said after the 7-2 win, Bader is “day-to-day.”
“Obviously when he went after that ball and he hit the wall and then when he landed, so it’s kinda like the neck area, upper back, neck type deal,” the manager said. “So as of right now, it’s day-to-day.”
Bader said all of the tests came out clean during the game and expects to be back in the lineup for Wednesday.
“More precautionary, whenever the neck tightens up like that, due to just kind of bracing, it could potentially lead to more things down the road, where I and the team don’t want to [risk] those with where we’re at in the season.
“So it was just precautionary, but everything is fine. I’m happy. It could have been a lot worse.”
With nobody down in the bottom half of the third, Bader ranged back to right center field tracking a ball off of Jacob Young’s bat and banged into the chain link fence covering the digital scoreboard in right-center field.
Bader said the collision with the wall happened as lost where he was on the field while going back on the ball causing him to hit his head on the fence.
“It’s just kinda hard with that scoreboard out there, it’s a bit of an obstacle illusion in your peripheral vision,” he said. “Because the scoreboard is what you see, but obviously the black [chain link] fence is in front of it, so I just thought I had a little bit more room.”
He stayed down for a moment, was not looked at by trainers and stayed in the game for the remainder of the third.
Tyrone Taylor moved from right field to centerfield, Jeff McNeil shifted from left to right and Brandon Nimmo – who missed Monday's game after fainting in the early hours of the day in his hotel room – entered the game to play in left field.
Mendoza added he was “pretty comfortable” going to Nimmo, who said before the game that he was available off the bench.
“After he went through his pregame routine, he came in the office and said I’m good to go,” Mendoza said. “And after he saw the Bader play he went right [into the clubhouse] and started moving around. So he was ready to go and obviously we saw it.”
After striking out in his first at-bat, Nimmo notched an RBI single in the eighth and a two-out RBI double in the 10th.
The Mets were already working with a short bench after DH J.D. Martinez was a late scratch due to a sore left ankle.