Mark Vientos’ first base struggles continue with two more defensive miscues
· Yahoo Sports
Mark Vientos continues to go through it on both sides of the ball.
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After going hitless across his three at-bats during Sunday's nail-biting win in Atlanta, the slugger is now down to an ugly .211 average and .641 OPS on the season.
Worse, though, Vientos had two more misplays in the field.
The first came just a couple of batters into the game, as he was unable to corral a Nolan McLean pickoff attempt at first which cost the Mets two bases and a run.
McLean was credited with the error which he owned, though, saying he needed to make a better throw.
But Vientos was to blame for the second one.
The 26-year-old was eaten up by a Jim Jarvis chopper to first leading off the fifth, falling to the seat of his pants before he was unable to cleanly make the throw to McLean covering at the bag.
It was already Vientos’ seventh error in what's been an extremely sloppy season.
“I think he got caught in between,” interim manager Andy Green said. “He initially broke forward and then ended up backing up and retreating and just got caught in between.
“You never want to criticize physical errors because the game is hard, but he expects to make that play, I know we all expect him to make that play too -- that’s what we gotta do.”
Vientos’ -8 OAA is tied for the worst at the position.
He wasn’t the only Met with sloppy play on Sunday, though, as Huascar Brazoban attempted a pickoff while Jared Young was nowhere near the first base bag in the brutal ninth inning.
The usually reliable Tyrone Taylor also had a costly miscue in left field in that ninth.
“I certainly think we can play cleaner baseball,” Green said. “It’s talented individuals, we can play cleaner baseball -- we should hold ourselves responsible to that, and that’s to each individual man and us collectively as a group.”