Francisco Lindor homers left-handed, Mets win 5th straight game

LOS ANGELES — Until Friday night at Dodger Stadium, Francisco Lindor had not recorded an extra-base hit from the left side of the plate. As a lefty, Lindor hadn’t recorded many hits at all.

Although he has shown some recent flashes of emerging from an early-season slump, nearly all those have occurred as a right-handed hitter. From the left side, the switch-hitting Lindor entered his seventh-inning at-bat hitting .093.

So when Lindor finally unleashed a swing capable of changing all that, sending a two-run homer over the right-field fence to snap a tie at Chavez Ravine and lift the Mets to a 9-4 win over the Dodgers, he allowed a bit of emotion to show. As he touched first base, Lindor smacked coach Antoan Richardson’s hand, then made a fist with his left and clenched it tightly. As he crossed home plate, Lindor wrapped both Starling Marte and DJ Stewart in bear hugs.

“Whenever you have teammates and people pulling for you, when you have results like that, I tend to release more of my emotions,” he said. “Usually, I just tap my chest a couple times, thank the Lord and carry on. But Marte’s been by me, sticking with me, and that’s the first person I saw. So yeah, I gave him a hug. And then Pete [Alonso], Stewart and everybody else celebrating in the dugout, it was pretty cool.

“Having success at the moment the team needs it, it definitely feels good.”

The win was the Mets’ fifth in a row. The home run was Lindor’s fifth as a left-handed hitter since last year’s All-Star Game. He later added a single and his first stolen base.

Along the way, the Mets added plenty of other offense against the Dodgers and starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, an offseason free-agent target who spurned their nine-figure offer to go to Los Angeles. Stewart homered off Yamamoto and drove home three runs on the night, while Harrison Bader logged three of his career-high-tying four hits against him.

But it was Lindor who came through with the night’s most significant hit, moments after the Dodgers took advantage of two Joey Wendle errors to tie the game in the sixth. Batting left-handed against righty reliever Daniel Hudson, Lindor threw his weight into a hanging 3-2 slider and sent it into the Dodger Stadium bleachers.

“Switch-hitting is not easy,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “Hitting in the big leagues is hard, let alone switch-hitting. There’s going to be times where you feel better from one side than the other, and right now, that’s the case. But I like the at-bats of late from the left side.”

For Lindor, switch-hitting has always been part art, part science. When Lindor finds something that works from one side of the plate, he tries to mirror it. The shortstop’s swings are not perfectly symmetrical, but they are close enough for his mechanics from one batter’s box to carry into the other one.

“I try to be the same player from both sides,” Lindor said.

Although he has always been a better hitter from the right side of the plate, that’s not particularly unusual; nearly every switch-hitter is stronger from one side — typically their natural side. And historically, Lindor’s splits have never been stark. In 2022, for example, Lindor’s OPS was only five points different from each side of the plate. For the first eight years of his career, he had an .826 OPS from the right side and .811 from the left.

But Lindor’s splits last season were unusually skewed, particularly in the second half. The trend became even more apparent early this season, when nearly all his production came as a right-handed batter against left-handed pitchers. So lost was (half of) Lindor that earlier this week, a reporter asked Mendoza if his star shortstop might consider giving up switch-hitting altogether.

Mendoza laughed off the question and, two days later, Lindor appeared to unlock something. In the third inning against Yamamoto, he missed barreling a splitter — in his own estimation — by about half an inch. In the fifth, Lindor sent a fly ball 292 feet into center fielder Andy Pages’ glove.

Finally, in the seventh, he found what he was looking for — and in the moment, Lindor didn’t rightly care if it came right-handed, left-handed or upside down.

“I could go up to the plate standing in the middle of the plate and swing straight down,” Lindor said, laughing. “If I get it done, I’ll still have the same emotion.”