Ejection is Thor subject for Mets

NEW YORK — A few strides closer to home plate than where he started, a streak of blond hair matted to his forehead, Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard turned his palms upward and stared. Inside, there was “a whirlwind of emotion.” Outside, Syndergaard’s face was granite, his hands the only evidence of a problem.

By the time Syndergaard stepped off the field, Mets manager Terry Collins had long since bolted past him, craning his neck upward to yammer at home-plate umpire Adam Hamari. Collins was livid; Hamari had ejected Syndergaard without warning in the third inning of the Mets’ 9-1 loss to the Dodgers, after a 99-mph fastball whizzed behind second baseman Chase Utley. With Syndergaard and Collins both in the clubhouse, Utley later homered twice to tear open a wound not quite healed in seven months.

Hamari perceived it as vigilante justice in a game that no longer has much patience for that sort of thing.

“I was a little shocked, yeah,” Syndergaard said. “But knowing our past with the Dodgers, I can see why they might have thought different.”

It was a little more than seven months ago that Utley slid hard into second base during National League Division Series Game 2, fracturing former Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada’s leg and knocking him out for the postseason. Before the Mets’ first series against the Dodgers earlier this month, Collins spoke to his pitchers about comporting themselves wisely amid public expectation of retaliation.

“We’re not going to say to them, ‘Don’t do anything,’ but you’ve got to understand that we don’t need anybody hurt and we don’t need anybody …

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