In the first game, Marcus Stroman took the hill for the Mets. He was greeted rudely in the bottom of the first inning when Paul Goldschmidt took him deep to put the Cardinals up 1-0. In the third inning, Stroman gave up three straight singles to Dylan Carlson, Goldschmidt, and Nolan Arenado, scoring another run.
Two runs shouldn’t have been an insurmountable challenge for the Mets, but the offense was cold as ice early in the evening. The Mets got their chance in the fourth inning against Cardinals’ starter Kwang Hyun Kim, but so many bizarre things happened in that inning that it seems miraculous that the inning ever ended, let alone that the Mets scratched out a run.