Walks continue to sting Mets pitchers in NLCS against patient Dodgers

Walks will kill you.

The thing about old baseball adages is, they become adages for a reason: They’re true.

Walks have hurt Mets pitchers in the first three games of the NLCS and been fatal in two of them.

In Game 3, Luis Severino walked four in 4.2 innings. Reed Garrett came in to walk two in 1.1 innings. And Tylor Megill added two more in his 3.0 innings. The result was an 8-0 loss and a 2-1 series deficit to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

"Especially when you're facing a team like this,” manager Carlos Mendoza said about the need to avoid nibbling around the strike zone. “That's what makes this team such a good team offensively because they control the strike zone. They're not going to chase as much. They don't have guys there that chase as much.”

Walks have been a problem all year, as the Mets handed out the third-most (586) in the majors during the regular season. That's 42 more than the nearest playoff team.

New York pitchers issued five walks in three games against Milwaukee and 16 in four games against Philadelphia.

They have now issued 22 through 26 innings against a very patient Los Angeles side that earned the second-most walks in MLB during the season with 602.

The added traffic has contributed to higher-stress at-bats (even more than normal playoff stress), higher pitch counts and shorter outings from the starters. All of that takes the ball literally out of the hands of the Mets' starting pitchers, who have been the backbone of the team and one of the main reasons they made it this far.

“You could make a case that one of the big reasons we're here is because of our starting pitching and their ability to go deep in games, giving us an opportunity to win baseball games and be more flexible and give guys from the bullpen a breather,” Mendoza said before Wednesday's first pitch. “With baseball, it comes down to starting pitching. That's where it starts. It starts on the mound.”

And this deep into the year – with Game 2’s starter Sean Manaea and Game 3’s Severino both well beyond the number of innings they pitched last season – the extra workload from giving away at-bats compounds all other issues like command and effectiveness of swing-and-miss stuff.

“We also have to understand where we're at in the season and where they're at physically. They're in territory now where nobody expected it,” Mendoza said before the game. “It's the middle of October… Sean hit the wall, he was looking pretty good and then two walks right away.”

The back-to-back walks Manaea issued to start the sixth inning ended his night before he threw his 90th pitch in Game 2. And, both of the runners he put on came around to score.

And that's the rub, the old adage is true but doesn’t tell the full story: Walks set the table for bad things to happen, but it is what comes next that really kills you.

On Wednesday night, two of the Dodgers who walked came around to score, including the game’s first run (compounded by a series of defensive miscues) in a two-run second.

In Game 1, Kodai Senga handed out four free passes in 1.1 innings and three of those batters came around to score.

In all, 40 percent of the 20 runs scored by the Dodgers in the series have reached base via the walk.

With the Mets’ offense struggling for consistency, the pitching staff is going to have to pick up the slack.

“We've got to not only get ahead but we've got to continue to stay on the attack and execute pitches,” Mendoza said. “If we get behind in counts, they're going to make us pay.”