Laura Albanese: Mets can use Tommy Pham's fire, especially against Dodgers
The Mets' Tommy Pham bats during the third inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday in Los Angeles. Credit: AP/Kyusung Gong
LOS ANGELES — The Mets rolled into Chavez Ravine on Monday looking like a team lost.
Facing the two-time defending world champions is one thing, but doing it on their turf having dropped their previous five games is another. And if all that wasn’t enough of an ego blow, this is also the Dodgers team that lured away Edwin Diaz and Kyle Tucker in public, borderline embarrassing coups.
Juan Soto is hurt, and weeks away from a return. To add insult to literal injury, the Dodgers had Justin Wrobleski on the hill Monday against a team that hasn’t fared all that well against lefties this year, hitting .236 despite an offseason effort to improve in that area. No worries, though, because they’ll face righties Tuesday and Wednesday: You know, easy targets Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani. (That, dear reader, was sarcasm.)
At this rate, the Dodgers felt like schoolyard bullies set to pounce on the Mets’ at their most vulnerable.
So you’d have to forgive fans for being suspect when David Stearns’ counterpunch came in the form of Tommy Pham, signed to a minor-league deal earlier this season, and promoted to the big-league roster on Monday. Ronny Mauricio was optioned in a corresponding move.
But it’s far from the worst idea in the world. No one is going to replace Soto, and you could certainly argue that the Mets should have done more to protect themselves in the case of prolonged injury. Hindsight doesn’t get you very far, though, and at the very least, Pham possesses two very necessary traits:
1. You won’t find a harder worker. That was evident enough when Pham was with this team in 2023, and even at 38, he proclaimed Monday that he was “in better shape than a lot of the guys in this league.”
He added: “I show up. I prepare. I’m just a pro. I know how to play the game. I love the game. That’s what you’re going to get. One thing I told myself this year, I’m going to go harder, I want to leave everything on the table. That’s what I got for you.”
Manager Carlos Mendoza strongly agreed, noting that Pham is a “competitor, a pro, [and] a guy that goes about his business the right way [in] the way he competes and how much he wants to win.”
The Mets, who’ve looked listless despite their best efforts, could stand a little bit of Pham’s fire. His preparation on and off the field is thorough; he has a careerlong reputation as a mercurial, sometimes hot-headed player, but a lot of that comes from being misunderstood.
“A lot of smiles on faces today,” he said of his reception. “I’m happy I could provide some sunshine.”
When news of the call-up leaked Sunday, Mendoza said he got texts from coaches and ex-coaches telling him “how much they love this guy.”
2. He can hit lefthanded pitching, and that’s how Mendoza plans to use him. Monday, he played leftfield and batted seventh.
While Soto struggled against lefties so far in this young season, he’s a career .261 hitter against southpaws, and his contributions continue to be missed. Francisco Lindor and Jorge Polanco, two guys who have historically done well against lefties, have looked lost against them this year. Lindor, a career .280 hitter against lefties, is batting .176 against them in what has been a cold start to his season. Polanco, who also hits lefties better than righties (.267 vs. .259 in his career) came into the day 0-for-12 against them this season.
Pham, meanwhile, has a very respectable .261/.368/.434 slash line against lefties, with 49 homers in 1,129 at bats. By contrast, he has 100 homers against righties in almost triple the at-bats.
“It’s a small sample size,” Mendoza said about the team’s struggles in that arena. “I’m expecting that to change quickly here.”
Either way, it’ll take far, far more than Pham. Heck, last year, it took far, far more than Soto, who had one of the best seasons in his Hall of Fame-track career. The starting pitching, which has been solid but suffered through clunkers from David Peterson and Kodai Senga last week, needs to find some consistency, particularly against the current best-hitting team in baseball.
The biggest issue is the offense, which came into the day batting .211/.255/.286 over the previous seven days. Unsurprisingly, Soto has been their best hitter this season, and was batting .355 with a homer and five RBIs before straining his right calf on April 3. He stayed back in New York during this six-game road trip, Mendoza said, and hasn’t started running yet.
And sure, things are still on target for a late-April return, but the Mets intend to do more imaging to make sure he’s healing as he should, and who knows what will happen there. DHing him isn’t that strong of an option, either, because “for a guy that gets on base as much as he does, he’s still going to be running the bases,” Mendoza said.
“In order for us to bring him over here, [it’s] because he’s 100% or close to 100%.”
So now the Mets tread water. They hope Lindor, Polanco and Marcus Semien — all batting under .200 — wake up from their ruts. They hope Senga’s last outing was a fluke in what had been a promising start to the season. They hope Peterson figures it out.
And sure, though hardly an ideal situation, they hope Pham can provide a little oomph to the oomph-less.
“A lot of guys are hungry from what I see in preparation and everything,” Pham said. “I like that. It makes me go out there and work harder. You feed off one another.”
The Mets just have to hope it’s a feast, not a slop of gruel.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.