Mets Rally in the Capital and Put an End to Their Slide
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON — The Mets bunted over runners. They took the extra base . Their bullpen protected a lead. And, for the first time in a week, they won a ballgame. David Wright’s three RBIs, Moises Alou’s three hits and Mike Pelfrey’s good-enough start helped the Mets beat the Washington Nationals 8–4 last night, ending a five-game losing streak that cut their lead in the NL East to 11 /2 games.
Pelfrey (3–7) allowed three runs in five-plus innings to win his third consecutive decision. After he left, Jorge Sosa and Aaron Heilman combined for three shutout innings, a stretch that began with Sosa getting a strikeout and a double play to escape a first-and-third, no-outs jam in the sixth. Billy Wagner gave an unearned run in the ninth.
There were plenty of Mets fans in the announced crowd of 20,558, and they greeted Wright’s plate appearances with “M-V-P!” chants. He drove in runs with a single in the third that gave him 100 RBIs for the season, a sacrifice fly in the fifth and a double in the seventh. That last hit, on a liner to right, might have been a single, but Wright stretched it into a double, sliding around the tag at second. Not all was perfect about this performance, though, with Wright making one of New York’s three errors — giving the team 13 in its past four games. But other positive contributions did include all of those hits from Alou, who left Tuesday’s game with a left quadriceps injury and was a game-time decision Wednesday. He wound up legging out a double plus two singles, scoring twice and driving in a run before leaving for a pinch-runner in the seventh. His 23-game hitting streak is the NL’s longest this season. Paul Lo Duca also departed early, although not before delivering two runs with sacrifice flies. Lo Duca was called out on strikes in the eighth but argued he had been hit on the arm by the final pitch of the at-bat.