WASHINGTON -- Brandon Nimmo hadn’t been having the best start to the year entering play on Monday. He’d been making decent contact and hitting balls hard, but they weren’t dropping for hits.
Manager Carlos Mendoza discussed as much pregame, saying, “He'll get through it. He's fighting through it now, and he's a good hitter.”
It’s safe to say Nimmo won that fight, as he broke out big time in the Mets’ 19-5 series-finale win over the Nats to split the four-game set at Nationals Park, going 4-for-6 with two home runs and nine RBIs to tie Carlos Delgado (June 27, 2008, against the Yankees) for the franchise record for most RBIs in a single game.
“We started seeing the Nimmo that we all know,” Mendoza said postgame. “Pretty good player, and it was good to see him go out there and have that type of performance.”
It was not only a franchise-best type of performance, but also something done so rarely in Major League Baseball.
Nimmo became the first player in MLB since the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani on Sept. 19, 2024, to record at least nine RBIs. He also became the third player since RBIs became official (1920) to tally nine-plus RBIs in a three-inning span (the sixth through eighth), joining Sammy Sosa of the Cubs in Colorado on Aug. 10, 2002 (innings three-five) and Ivan Rodriguez of the Rangers in Seattle on April 13, 1999 (innings one-three), per the Elias Sports Bureau.
Nimmo is also just the second player with nine-plus RBIs in a game in the sixth inning or later since RBIs became official (1920), joining Mike Moustakas (also nine RBIs) on Sept. 12, 2015, per Elias.
On a more personal level, it was Nimmo’s first career game with multiple multirun homers, after he launched a three-run home run in the sixth and a grand slam in the seventh for the seventh multihomer game of his career.
“You have an idea,” Nimmo said. “There's definitely a part of you that is keeping track, especially when [first-base coach Antoan Richardson] came up after the double -- the last time I got on base -- and he was like, ‘Well, nine RBIs, that's got to be a career high, right?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that definitely is.’ … I think before this, my career high was like five, and that was an amazing day as well.”
Of course, Nimmo had no clue about the full magnitude of his achievement until postgame.
“It was told to me right after the game,” Nimmo said. “And I had no idea. … I was thinking, ‘Oh man, it'd be really cool to get double-digit RBIs in a day,’ when I was coming up before Swaggy [Mark Vientos] hit the three-run homer. And I was like, ‘Oh man, yeah, this would be sweet if I could get a couple more out of it.’”
It was indeed Vientos who crushed Nimmo’s dreams of a 10-plus-RBI game, launching a three-run homer of his own in the ninth inning before Nimmo stepped to the plate. And, as Vientos trotted around the bases and Nimmo readied himself to step to the plate, he was grinning -- knowing he would have to settle for just nine, maybe 10 if he could hit another homer (he didn’t).
The offensive outpouring from Nimmo put an exclamation mark on the victory, which ensured New York headed back home without losing back-to-back games for a second time this season (also: April 15-16 vs. the Twins).
Nimmo had some help, of course, including Jeff McNeil’s first home run of the season in the fifth inning and that three-run blast from Vientos in the ninth -- his first career three-run knock.
Nimmo didn’t have the only history-making moment, though, as Francisco Lindor was hit by a pitch twice in the same inning, just the seventh player to do so since 1974.
But all the attention, and all the exuberance, was saved for Nimmo, as he achieved a feat few in baseball have done. Even more so, it was a weight lifted off the outfielder’s shoulders, able to face the final days of April and enter May breathing a sigh of relief.
“It's been a little bit frustrating,” Nimmo said. “And you never know, days like today might happen -- obviously, tying a franchise record in RBIs, that obviously doesn't happen every day. But even just getting balls in the air, hitting balls hard -- it doesn't always work out like that. So really just enjoyed today.
“... These days don't come around that often, and you just, you kind of sit back and enjoy it.”