NEW YORK — Baseball has a way of foiling even the best-laid plans.
The Giants, so they thought, identified the ideal pocket of the Mets batting order to start Alex Wood’s outing. With lefty Brett Baty due up to begin the third inning, manager Gabe Kapler decided to go away from Ross Stripling, their starter/opener/whatever you want to call it at this point, despite breezing through the Mets’ first seven batters.
The matchup was supposed to give Wood a soft landing: the bottom two hitters of the Mets’ order and a platoon advantage against two of the first three batters he would face. It almost immediately began to go awry, as Wood had little feel for anything but his two-seam fastball and was out of the game before the end of the fourth inning.
