Luke Weaver wasn’t the pitcher the Mets needed to pause their misery Thursday, but he could be the right amateur therapist to help teammates get through the hard times.
Weaver served up the two-run, eighth-inning home run that turned a one-run lead into a 5-4 loss to the Nationals at Citi Field.
He had not allowed a run in four straight appearances, so his hanging changeup to CJ Abrams was particularly ill-timed as the Mets fell for the 17th time in their past 20 games.
“This pursuit of perfection is just an ultimate pressurized failure mindset,” said Weaver, the main target of matinee booing. “I just think it becomes everybody wants to be the hero because we care and we want to win really, really bad. And I just don’t think success lives in that realm. The freedom of which we play day to day is kind of being suffocated a little bit.”
All blown saves are not created equally. Weaver admitted the disappointment is “severely” worse when the Mets (an MLB-worst 10-21) are in such a slide.
“Of course, I sit there and feel the weight of the world and feel like I let the team down,” Weaver said, “but, at the end of the day, I do feel like I’m in a good spot. We sit there and tell you guys, ‘It’ll come, this is the game, this is the law of averages’ and all these things. But those words just don’t hold the same weight when you continue to go day after day.”
Mark Vientos’ go-ahead RBI double in the bottom of the sixth inning put the Mets in the ideal position of having their top three relievers available to close out a series win.
Brooks Raley did the job in the seventh inning and Devin Williams pitched a high-wire scoreless ninth.
“Typically you don’t see an entire collective group at the same time not playing their best brand of baseball,” Weaver said. “It just feels like there is a little bit of a culture that has adapted to it unintentionally. That’s just how winning and losing goes.”
Yikes.
“Sleep is lost, the mind wanders and you just kind of get into a fixation that you don’t really need to be in,” Weaver added. “The answer is just kind of in those words — it’s simplifying the process, maybe it’s doing less reps, maybe it’s more about just enjoying why you do this for a living and trying to find your inner kid and the joy of why you play the game.”