Throughout a nightmarish 2013 season, a vocal percentage of Mets fans have demanded Ike Davis’s banishment from Flushing.
Following the Mets’ 4-1 win over NL East rival Atlanta Tuesday night at Citi Field, in which Davis’s RBI double in the sixth inning scored the game-winning run, the first baseman offered a glimpse into the psyche of a player who believes he does not have fan support.
“I’m going with [a mentality of] I’m an away player now,” Davis said. “The crowd gets on me no matter what. I take a pitch and they boo. It doesn’t really matter.”
Since returning from Las Vegas on July 5, Davis has shown more patience at the plate and is 10-for-39 with four RBIs and seven runs scored. Still, even with his 1-for-4 evening, Davis is hitting just .176 with five home runs, 20 RBIs and 23 runs scored this season.
“I’m just trying to have good at-bats every time,” Davis said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. [I’ve made] more solid contact the last [few] games I started. It’s definitely a positive.”
Davis broke a 1-1 deadlock in the sixth by slamming Kris Medlen’s 0-2 curveball to the right-field wall for a RBI double that scored Daniel Murphy and moved Marlon Byrd to third. John Buck followed with an RBI single and Juan Lagares hit a sac fly to complete the three-run inning.
“It definitely felt great,” Davis said of his hit. “I’m just glad it hit the wall.”
Davis’s double was the game’s biggest play, but it would have been meaningless without the work by Carlos Torres, who earned his first win of the season.
Last night marked Torres’s first appearance since throwing five innings in the Mets’ 4-2 loss to the Pirates on July 13. Before the game, manager Terry Collins said the plan was to have Torres throw “90 to 95” pitches. He finished with 96 in six innings.
“The thing that he’s brought here is, when he went to Las Vegas he did what he did the year before: He stepped up in a tough place to pitch and showed everybody he knows how to pitch and he can pitch,” Collins said.
“He was a huge part of our bullpen. He’s a huge part of the fact [that] when we were playing [well], we could go to that bullpen knowing Carlos could give us two, three innings and shut the door on somebody. And he’s done that. Knowing that there was a possibility we were going to start him some time — we knew he was lengthened out enough to make that start — and all he does is take [the] baseball and going out and pitch great. So we’re hoping the long rest doesn’t affect him.
“Nobody works harder. When you say, ‘run,’ he runs as hard as he can. When you say, ‘throw,’ he throws as hard as he can. We’re hoping that he gives us what he did the last [time] out.”
Torres struck out six in six innings. He walked two and scattered seven hits, yielding only one run on Andrelton Simmons’s leadoff homer in the first. Torres’s RBI single in the third scored Lagares to tie the game at 1-1. The base hit was the third of his career, and his second career RBI. Torres had two hits, an RBI and a run scored last season in Colorado.
Bobby Parnell threw a 1-2-3 ninth to earn his 19th save. The Mets improved to 44-52 on the season, and are 3-2 since the All-Star break.
Follow Mets beat writer Denis Gorman on Twitter @DenisGorman.
