LOS ANGELES — It happened in a literal blink, a quiver of Mark Vientos’ eyebrow under his sunglasses when he understood the Los Angeles Dodgers’ decision. They wanted nothing to do with Francisco Lindor, and they preferred Landon Knack face Vientos in a crucial spot.

“All right, you want me up?” Vientos summarized his own look. “I’m gonna show you.”

“There’s one thing that Mark doesn’t lack, and that’s confidence,” Lindor said chuckling. “That’s who he is. I’m glad he took it personal.”

It takes a certain kind of confidence to view that decision by Los Angeles, to bypass your team’s obvious MVP who’d already homered in the game to face you, as disrespectful. But you don’t step into the big leagues at 22 calling yourself “Swaggy V” without that precise level of hubris. And on Monday in Game 2 of the NLCS, Vientos justified that self-belief as he has all season long.

Vientos’ second-inning grand slam was the keynote of the Mets’ 7-3 win over the Dodgers on Monday in Chavez Ravine. A day after being flattened by Los Angeles, the Mets returned the favor to even the series. Game 3 is in Queens on Wednesday night.

SLAMMA-JAMMA@MarkVientos_5 | #LGM pic.twitter.com/UzsPArfiPP

— x – New York Mets (@Mets) October 14, 2024

At this point, it’s no surprise to see the Mets pick themselves off the mat as swiftly as they did Monday. Resilience is the animating impulse of this team, and its belief in its ability to rebound has only strengthened throughout the season.

But belief, like currency, requires something legitimate in reserve backing it up. And so often for the Mets this season, that belief has been fueled by the quality of their at-bats, by the finer points of pitch recognition, of controlling counts, of seizing upon a mistake in the moment.

That belief is built on at-bats like Monday’s biggest from Lindor and Vientos.

Vientos’ at-bat against Knack was a clear pivot point early in the game. The Mets had jumped ahead on Lindor’s leadoff homer, and they’d added one run already against Knack in the second. But Francisco Alvarez had popped up with two in scoring position, and the Dodgers were an out away from keeping the game tight.

Given his reaction to Lindor’s free pass, you might have expected Vientos to be especially aggressive against Knack. But his emerging sense of poise was obvious from the start, when he comfortably took Knack’s strike-to-ball slider to start the at-bat.

“He understands that he’s not bigger than the moment,” Lindor said of Vientos’ approach. “He’s just got to be part of the moment.”

Vientos fouled off a pair of sliders to make it 1-2, then fouled back a hard fastball above the strike zone. Vientos hunts the fastball: More than half his homers this year came on heaters, and he slugged .670 when he put in play four-seam fastballs like Knack’s.

Which is why, when ahead 1-2, Knack threw him four straight sliders — two in the dirt he laid off and two on the plate he fouled off. Eight pitches deep into the at-bat, Knack tried to get a fastball by him on the outside corner. It was right down the middle.

“I didn’t think he was going to give me a fastball,” Vientos said. “My approach was to see a heater up, but I wasn’t expecting heater. I thought I was going to get a slider and I was just going to poke it in the hole.”

And when he saw the fastball?

“Yeah, I wasn’t going to miss it.”

Vientos took it 391 feet the other way to make it 6-0.

“The deeper you get into the at-bat, you’ve got more information,” Lindor said.

“You only have so many tricks,” said reliever Ryne Stanek, explaining the pitcher’s perspective on those long at-bats. “It makes the at-bat substantially harder when you’ve exposed everything you’ve got.”

Vientos is backing up a breakout regular season with a bonkers postseason: Through nine games, he’s hitting .378 with three home runs and a 1.086 OPS. (10/86? That was a good month for the Mets.)

“He’s growing up,” said Lindor.

“He’s been doing special things this whole year,” starter Sean Manaea said. “He’s risen to every occasion.”

Lindor had provided a blueprint for that at-bat one inning earlier, leading off the game. Against Ryan Brasier, Lindor fouled off two fastballs and two sliders before, on the eighth pitch, Brasier resorted to his third-best pitch: a cutter he’d thrown just 12 percent of the time this season.

That, too, was center-cut. Lindor banged it into the Mets bullpen, halting Los Angeles’ 33-inning scoreless streak in the process.

“It just kickstarts everything,” Manaea said. “It’s a new day, it’s a new game. You can’t really start off any better way.”

“(It was big) not just because of the homer but the way he attacked him,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “He fouled off a couple of pitches, laid off a couple of breaking balls and got a pitch and drove it to set the tone.”

The Mets worked those long plate appearances all day. Jesse Winker had helped spark the rally in the second with a seven-pitch walk. Tyrone Taylor drove in a run despite being down in the count 0-2. Pete Alonso had a 10-pitch at-bat later, even if it ended in a strikeout.

The series now returns to Queens, shortened to a best-of-five with home-field advantage shifting to the Mets.

“We get punched in the face and we continue to find ways to get back up,” Mendoza said. “And it will continue to be that way.”

(Photo of Mark Vientos: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)

EXCLUSIVE: NASCAR star Bubba Wallace was once accused of bringing politics into NASCAR. But in this year’s election, he won’t go near it.

In July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the George Floyd riots. Wallace made multiple posts on X (then known as Twitter) condemning former President Donald Trump for promoting hate. 

Wallace then alleged that he’d been told he was “bringing politics into NASCAR,” in response to his condemnation for Trump. He hasn’t made any such posts at all regarding the 2024 election, or any political subject of such a matter via public statements. 

“Investing my time into that seems like a waste of time,” Wallace told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. “I was definitely more vocal then because our sport was in desperate need of change.” 

Now in 2024, Wallace only has one message to send to his fans about the beliefs he wants to share with them.

“Go to McDonald’s,” Wallace said when asked by Fox News Digital what beliefs he would like to express to his fans in this election year. “Buy a meal, get the 10-piece chicken nugget, fries, Dr. Pepper and then round up that money, all of that money goes to [Ronald McDonald House Charities].” 

For Wallace, the sudden shift in priorities comes after four years as an ascendant star in NASCAR. But also milestone moments for him in building a family. In 2021 he joined Michael Jordan’s NASCAR team, serving as the first driver in the car to sport Jordan’s famous No. 23. In 2022, Wallace tied his own record as the highest-finishing Black driver in the Dayton 500. 

In that time, he also got engaged and married to his wife, Amanda Carter. And they just had their first child, a son named Becks Hayden Wallace on Sept. 29. 

He admitted his priorities have changed, and credited becoming a father for it. He also claims that he is now looking beyond “which side” someone is on. 

“My beliefs stand strong in just being good humans to other people is the best way to go about life. No matter what side you’re on, no matter what color you are, at the end of the day we’re in this world together and we have to make it work together. And I think I’ve said that from day one and that hasn’t changed and nor will it change.” 

Wallace has abandoned the act of making his political beliefs known on social media. He even went as far as to delete all social media apps on his phone altogether. His feed on X nowadays is just a curated mix of racing photos, promotional posts and photos of family. 

One of the biggest reasons Wallace abandoned that habit from 2020 is because of culture shifts in social media during that time. Wallace said there is overwhelming “negativity” on the platforms he would use to get any messages of his beliefs out. 

NASCAR ICON RICHARD CHILDRESS DESCRIBES ‘GREAT’ RECEPTION FOR JD VANCE APPEARANCE AT NORTH CAROLINA RACE

Bubba Wallace, driver of the #23 McDonald’s Toyota, pits during the NASCAR Cup Series 65th Annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 19, 2023 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

“Social media nowadays is just a way for people to hide behind a screen and voice their opinions on things they don’t really know about,” Wallace said. 

The main social media platform that Wallace used during his 2020 criticisms against Trump was Twitter. In the four years since then, the platform has undergone a transformation under the ownership of tech mogul Elon Musk. Musk’s purchasing of the platform in October 2022 brought about sweeping staff turnover, a complete restructuring of how the platform verifies accounts, and the rebrand to X, among other changes. Some have called the sweeping changes a renaissance for free speech. But others have criticized Musk and the changes, including Democrat lawmakers. 

Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), requesting an investigation into election-related misinformation being published by the Grok AI chatbot on X. California governor Greg Newsome signed the country’s toughest law banning digitally altered political “deepfakes” on Sept. 17, after Musk for shared an AI-generated parody video mocking Kamala Harris’ candidacy for president.

Meanwhile, another social media platform has had an active hand in pushing leftist misinformation since 2020 as well. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in August that senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to “censor” some COVID-19 content during the pandemic and vowed that the social media giant would push back if it faced such demands again.

Bubba Wallace, driver of the #23 McDonald’s Toyota, and Justin Fields, quarterback of the Chicago Bears pose for photos at the drivers meeting at the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute of Chicago prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Grant Park 220 on July 02, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

And as a result, Wallace doesn’t believe the platforms are worth his time anymore, especially now that he’s a dad.

“It’s just too much negativity that it’s going to take years and years and years to get rid of, and we don’t have time for that,” Wallace said of the current culture of social media. “Now, with being a dad and trying to be the best that I can be here for my race team and my team here, that’s where I’m investing my energy so that’s all you can really ask for.”

For Wallace, the impact of becoming a father has been a transformative experience for him in such a short amount of time. Since his son was born, Wallace has two-top ten finishes in the three races that he’s competed in. He’s also looking at life through a lense he wasn’t looking through before.  

“You have your kid at home and a full family to provide for now, so it’s crazy to go through all that,” Wallace said. 

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It’s early days, but you fear Southampton might set a few unwanted records this season.

After seven games, they are winless, with only a point to their name and just four goals scored.

At least the club has the faint afterglow of success from winning promotion last season, though there is one member of their team who doesn’t even have that — and, instead, has within his sights one of the more undesirable individual records around.

Step forward Ben Brereton Diaz, who has played 20 Premier League games in his career so far — six for Southampton, 14 for Sheffield United last season — without winning any. That is the record for the most games played by someone who has never won a Premier League game, ahead of Marvin Sordell on 17, and Emanuel Villa on 16.

Unlike that duo, he still has a chance of celebrating his first victory. However, the Chile international is also in danger of setting the record for the most games played by an individual before being involved in a Premier League win (see table below).

This, hopefully, is not designed to denigrate or mock Brereton Diaz. He has just been unfortunate enough to play for a couple of struggling sides. You could argue he has been part of those struggling sides, so bears at least some of the responsibility for the failure to win. But with six goals in 14 games for Sheffield United, he ended the season as their joint-top scorer despite only joining in January, while he has frequently looked like Southampton’s most threatening attacker this term.

His teams haven’t won any games, but it’s not necessarily his fault.

You could even argue that Brereton Diaz is almost being punished for being good. If you’re a terrible player in a terrible team, you probably aren’t going to stay in that team. But if you’re a decent player in a terrible team, you’ll be out there every week, your win-loss record at the mercy of the dysfunction around you.

In any case, the list of players who have taken a long time to get their first win isn’t exactly full of complete duds.

Take Gareth Bale, who appeared in 24 games for Tottenham before he claimed his first Premier League victory. His was a slightly different case, because it wasn’t down to him joining a struggling team, but more an odd quirk of his first two seasons at Tottenham; a combination of coincidence, poor form and injury conspiring to keep him out of the games Spurs won in that time.

Bale joined Spurs from Southampton in 2007 and, while he had to wait a long time for his first Premier League success, he did win in his fourth appearance for their first team when they beat Anorthosis Famagusta 6-1 in the UEFA Cup.

Having appeared sporadically in the following months, his season was ended in December by an ankle injury. He returned at the start of the following season, when Spurs infamously took just two points from their first eight games, but missed their first victory of the season because he had been sent off in the previous match. From there, he was in and out of the team, variously injured or out of favour, but his presence always coincided with draws or defeats and the team won plenty of times in his absence.

But his winless Premier League run became a running joke, one of the early football social media memes after Opta spotted the unfortunate statistic. In the end, it spanned 1,607 minutes over those 24 games, lasting 762 days and taking in three Spurs managers.

He eventually broke the streak on a bit of a technicality: he came on in the closing stages of Tottenham’s victory over Burnley in September 2009, when they were already 4-0 up and eventually won 5-0. And that was a deliberate move by then Spurs manager Harry Redknapp, to shake the unwanted statistical millstone. Redknapp told talkSPORT in 2019: “I stuck him on against Burnley… with six minutes to go. I thought, ‘He can’t mess this up!’”

He didn’t. And over the following years, he went on to win scores of games basically on his own so, by the time he left for Real Madrid in 2013, he was significantly in credit.

“It was a bit annoying that people went on about that statistic but it didn’t affect me at all,” Bale told The Guardian in 2010 after things had turned around. “It was just one of those things that freakily happened. I knew as soon as I got my chance to play we’d win a few games and it’d be done.”

Bale had to wait 24 games to taste victory with Tottenham in the Premier League (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

The current unfortunate record holder is Scottish forward Oliver Burke, who took an excruciating 25 games to taste Premier League victory for the first time.

Burke played his first Premier League game for West Brom in August 2017 after joining from RB Leipzig, but injuries ensured he only played in 15 matches, none of which West Brom won. And in his defence, they didn’t win many without him, either: this was the season in which they were relegated, went through four managers and endured an ill-fated mid-season trip to Barcelona where a group of players stole a taxi from outside a McDonald’s.

As for Burke, he reappeared in the Premier League a couple of years later, signing for Sheffield United at the end of the summer 2020 transfer window. Again, he wasn’t a regular, so had to wait until the January of that season before contributing to a win, which came against Newcastle.

The Blades were also relegated, so Burke has only played in two Premier League seasons, both of which have ended in the drop. Poor Oliver. He is currently with Werder Bremen after a couple of injury-hit loans at Millwall and Birmingham City.

Rob Earnshaw is another name in the top 10 who can’t be entirely blamed for not collecting a victory for a long time. It took 18 games before he won one for West Brom in 2004-05, but he did rattle up 11 goals that season, was the Baggies’ top scorer and, in terms of minutes per goal, he was second only to Thierry Henry in the whole division that season.

“The context of that season and that team was lots of new players,” Earnshaw tells The Athletic. “It was a team that wasn’t really expected to be in the Premier League. We were trying to figure each other out: I had about five different strike partners in that season. You’re always trying to get those relationships, so that’s perhaps why it took so long (to get a win).”

Earnshaw in a rare moment of joy for West Brom in the autumn of 2004 (Nick Potts – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

That chopping and changing of the team’s forward line was also a reason why Earnshaw missed their rare victories. West Brom got their first three points in their eighth league game, a 2-1 win over Bolton in October, but Earnshaw was an unused substitute. Which itself presents a curious dilemma: when you haven’t won a game yet yourself, how do you feel when your team wins without you contributing?

“It’s a very strange thing, a very weird dynamic,” he says. “No 1, you’re always super happy when you win. I was always the first one to celebrate and congratulate my team-mates. But there’s always a weird feeling of disappointment. The No 1 thing is, that little kid in you just wants to play football and win games.”

Jan Aage Fjortoft is another unfortunate name on the list, having taken 20 games to earn his first first victory with Swindon in 1993-94. Swindon only won two games in the first half of that season, and Fjortoft missed both of them. But, unlike Earnshaw, he wasn’t a victim of squad rotation or injury: he missed those games because he wasn’t scoring goals.

After moving to Swindon for a club-record fee from Rapid Vienna following their promotion to the Premier League, Fjortoft did not find the net at all before the turn of the year.

“You start thinking, ‘Maybe the way I play doesn’t fit here — maybe I have to change’,” he tells The Athletic. “That’s the worst phase, because then you’re going nowhere. You’re building up to that moment, hopefully, when you get that first goal. But then you realise you just have to do what you do, because that’s good enough.

“It was a very testing time, and the thing that saved me was I was scoring goals for Norway, though that made it even more complicated in my head. Eventually, I wasn’t in the team as much, which is normal: Swindon had paid a lot of money for me to score goals.

“I was more annoyed that I didn’t break the code. I had played against these players before for Norway. We’d won against England. Why couldn’t I break this thing called the Premier League?”

Fjortoft celebrates scoring a goal for Swindon against Manchester United (Andy Heading/EMPICS via Getty Images)

Things reached a nadir when Fjortoft — still winless and goalless — played a reserve game against Wycombe Wanderers on Christmas Eve in which he was “out of 22 players… the worst on the pitch”. With the 1994 World Cup looming and his spot in the Norway team under threat, he arranged a loan back to his former club Lillestrom.

But then Keith Scott, who had been playing up front for Swindon instead of Fjortoft, was cup-tied for a game against Ipswich in the FA Cup. Fjortoft played, scored and kept his place for the league game against Tottenham a few days later. In that game he finally secured his first league goal, and first win in the English top flight, after 20 unsuccessful attempts, as they beat Spurs 2-1.

“It was fantastic,” he says. “There was a lot of relief for myself, but we beat Tottenham, and we were allowed to dream. Could we make it? Could we get enough points to stay up?”

Fjortoft had a sensational second half to the season: having failed to score at all in his first 20 games, he managed 11 in his next 16, although it wasn’t enough to save Swindon from relegation, broadly down to them conceding a whopping 100 goals.

Ultimately, it would be hugely unfair to treat Brereton Diaz or any of the players mentioned here as figures of fun. Not least because, by even making it to the Premier League, they’re already in the top one per cent of the top one per cent.

“When you get a chance to play in the Premier League, the playing is the actual achievement,” adds Earnshaw. “That’s the dream. You’re playing against the very best.”

(Top photo: Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)