It would’ve been a difficult ground ball for even the healthiest version of Brandon Nimmo to beat out, let alone the one that has dealt with plantar fasciitis since May before aggravating the injury during the NLDS.
But after Nimmo bounced a ball toward Chris Taylor, and after Taylor flipped it to Tommy Edman to kick-start an inning-ending double play, he tore down the first-base line, allowing the Mets to score a run during their eventual 10-2 loss to the Dodgers in Game 4 of the NLCS on Thursday.
“I was just going as fast as I possibly could,” Nimmo said. “Pulling it from the depths of inside of you, and just whatever you’ve got left, you lay it on the field and that’s what I had left.”
Still, Nimmo, who finished 2-for-5 after adding singles in the sixth and seventh, was clearly hampered by the injury. He limped out to left field the following frame. He couldn’t cut off a double by Mookie Betts — chopping his feet to a halt as it rolled to the wall instead of taking a sharper angle to cut it off — which allowed a second run to score during the sequence.
“I never don’t feel my foot,” Nimmo said, “but I’m going as fast as I can out there and doing what I can do. And I just wasn’t able to cut it off before it got to the wall. … There’s never a step that I take that I don’t feel it.”
Earlier in the week, in the hours before Game 3, Carlos Mendoza and Dave Roberts fielded versions of the same question.
They were asked about injuries to stars at the top of their lineups — Nimmo for the Mets, Freddie Freeman and his sprained right ankle for the Dodgers — threatening consistency entering the three-games-in-three-days NLCS sprint.
But both managers expressed optimism. Roberts, on Tuesday, had been even more adamant.
He didn’t “see any world” where Freeman missed an NLCS game. Just 24 hours later, though, that outlook changed. Freeman was out of the Game 4 lineup.
Mendoza checked with Nimmo in the seventh inning of Game 3 to see if he was OK to finish the game, and he reassured Mendoza that he could. Nimmo’s answer hadn’t wavered prior to that, either.
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But recently, the 31-year-old’s push to stay in the lineup coincided with a slump until the multi-hit night Thursday.
Freeman’s numbers have also dipped, and Roberts noticed Freeman hurting more Wednesday. After Game 3, he called the first baseman and told him about the lineup tweak.
And for the rest of their postseason, the Mets will face the reality of needing to make a similar call with Nimmo — weighing the risks and the rewards, the singles and the missed balls in the outfield, all of the complexities that collide when a star in the lineup tries to fight through an injury that just won’t get better any time soon.
