Mets players didn’t like Yasiel Puig staring at his home run

The Mets’ poor play is taking a mental impact on the players.

It was the bottom of the fourth inning in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. With the Dodgers already leading the Mets, 2-1, Yasiel Puig hit a mammoth three-run shot into the left field bleachers. As he slowly jogged and rounded first base, Wilmer Flores barked at him to keep running to which Puig responded by dropping an F-bomb. By the time he made it to the plate, catcher Travis d’Arnaud also shared his thoughts.

In truth, Puig did stare at his home run. He did take over 32 seconds to go around the bases — the second-longest time in Major League Baseball this season — but the Mets are the ones that come out looking bad from this situation.

After the game, Flores was asked about the incident, and responded that he doesn’t think Puig “knows what having respect for the game is.” Was it just that though? Would it have mattered if the Mets were playing better baseball this last week? Flores answered, “We’re playing horribly right now. We don’t need this s—.”

As fans, it’s easy for us to immediately take the side of the players on our team, but in this case, they were flat out wrong. The whole “have respect for the game” BS just comes out when you’re getting lit up (or another phrase Keith might use), but never when you’re the one doing it. Baseball is fun. Bat flips are fun. Staring at home runs when you made a ball disappear is fun.

If Wilmer or Travis wanted to get mad at someone, it should have probably been Tyler Pill for getting behind in the count on Puig and then trying to groove in a 91 m.p.h. fastball down the middle to him.

You want to stop players from staring at their home runs or having an amazing bat flip like Asdrubal Cabrera did with his 2016 walk-off? Stop letting them hit the ball out of the park in the first place.

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You’d think maybe that incident would have lit a fire under the team to hopefully get them back into the game, in which case it could have actually been a positive, but no. The Mets lost the game, 8-2, dropping their third straight and sixth out of their last eight games.

With their being one game left in the series, the bad blood from this game could spill over into Thursday night’s contest. Hopefully none of the Mets pitchers (Steven Matz included) feel the need to “deliver a message,” and instead of just pitch effectively enough to give this struggling team a chance to get back in the win column.