Ventura Returns to Shea and Slams the Mets
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Robin Ventura reminded the sinking Mets of their past and helped show why the Dodgers are looking to October.
Ventura hit his 17th grand slam, tying Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams for fourth place on the career list, and the Dodgers went on to a 10-2 victory yesterday.
It was Ventura’s third homer in 20 at bats against Kris Benson (10-11) and gave him the 1,000th run scored of his career. Mets fans, who booed their team after a pair of errors led to three unearned runs, cheered the former Met.
Los Angeles, which maintained its five-game lead in the NL West, scored three unearned runs in the fourth inning to take a 4-1 lead against the league’s worst-fielding team. Ventura, making only his 19th start of the season, broke the game open in the fifth.
The active leader in grand slams, Ventura, 37, helped the Mets win Game 5 of the 1999 NL championship series with a grand slam-single against Atlanta.
Kazuhisa Ishii (13-6) won his second straight start after going 0-1 during a five-start span. He allowed one run and four hits in six innings. Scott Stewart gave up a ninth-inning homer to rookie Jeff Keppinger, his second in two days.
Cesar Izturis matched his season high with four hits as the Dodgers sent the Mets to their seventh loss in eight games. Olmedo Saenz hit a ninth-inning solo homer off John Franco that bounced off a speaker in left-center field.
Benson dropped to 2-3 since the Mets acquired him from Pittsburgh on July 30, tying his season high by allowing eight runs in four-plus innings. Three of the runs were unearned because of his error and one by left fielder Cliff Floyd.
Adrian Beltre’s run-scoring double in the first put the Dodgers ahead, but Richard Hidalgo’s 22nd homer tied it in the second.
Then came the comedy of errors in the fourth, when Shawn Green led off with a single and Floyd, fighting the sun, let Ventura’s fly ball to left bounce off his glove for an error.
Brent Mayne hit a go-ahead sacrifice fly and Ishii singled up the middle. Ventura, who had held at third, came home when center fielder Gerald Williams’s throw home skipped off Benson’s leg for the Mets’ 116th error of the season. Izturis followed with an RBI single.
