PHOENIX -- During his first two at-bats against Diamondbacks starter Ryne Nelson on Thursday, Francisco Lindor appeared lost. Of the dozen pitches he saw, Lindor took three called strikes, fouled off four other pitches and swung through two of them.

When he approached the plate in the sixth inning to face Nelson one last time, Lindor ran through some mental cues in the box, urging himself to “hit the ball forward.” As he swung and missed at two more pitches, Lindor repeated that mantra. He fouled off a fastball. He took a ball to run the count full. He fouled off four more pitches. Then, finally, Lindor found what he wanted: a hanging changeup near the top of the zone, which he crushed into the right-field seats for a game-tying homer.

The 11-pitch at-bat was one of the most significant battles in a game full of grinding plate appearances for the Mets, who did just enough to earn a 3-2 win over the Diamondbacks, take both the three-game set and the season series from Arizona, escape their recent tour of National League West contenders with a winning record and, most importantly, keep themselves from falling any further back in the Wild Card race.

“We just waited until we could break them,” starting pitcher David Peterson said.

Lindor’s sixth-inning homer and Peterson’s seven solid innings, including a crucial double play ball in the seventh, gave the Mets a chance to do just that. The final blow came in the ninth, when Jesse Winker redirected a 100 mph Justin Martinez fastball into the left-center-field gap, J.D. Martinez took a similar opposite-field approach to move pinch-runner Tyrone Taylor to third, and Jose Iglesias smacked a 102 mph pitch off Geraldo Perdomo’s glove to give the Mets a lead.

Afterward, various Mets spouted all the usual sayings about the value of putting the ball in play, of keeping simple approaches, of not trying to swing for the fences. But their words carried additional weight, considering they had just proven their ability to do it.

“The at-bats one through nine, I was pretty pleased,” manager Carlos Mendoza said.

Added Iglesias: “I always say, when you put the ball in play, good things happen.”

All afternoon, up and down the roster, good things happened for the Mets in a game they very much needed to have. In addition to the contributions of Iglesias, Lindor and Peterson, Pete Alonso homered, José Buttó gave the Mets a scoreless inning and, as crucial as anything, Edwin Díaz rebounded from two consecutive losses to nail down the save in a dominant ninth.

“We are playing playoff games,” Díaz said, “and this team needs me.”

As a result of those efforts, the postgame clubhouse vibe was starkly different than it had been some 17 hours earlier, when Díaz’s blown save sent the Mets to a loss that, while not quite crippling, had harmed them to a significant extent. Entering Thursday’s play, the Mets only had a 12.7 percent chance to make the playoffs, according to FanGraphs calculations -- about four times lower than their odds a month ago.

One win, even against a team the Mets are trailing in the Wild Card race, won’t change those probabilities much. With 28 games to play, the Mets still face a significant uphill climb. They departed Chase Field 3 1/2 games back of the Braves for the final NL playoff spot. And the Braves, as everyone in New York’s orbit has noticed, haven’t been losing very often.

The Mets’ schedule does grow easier over the next two weeks, beginning Friday against a historically bad White Sox team. But had they lost Thursday, it would have been difficult to argue that a soft schedule matters. The Mets have reached a point where they need to be greedy. They survived a 10-game stretch against the Orioles, Padres and Diamondbacks with a 6-4 record. They’re going to need to do better than that against their upcoming competition if they hope to make a real run at the Braves.

They will need, in short, to grind out at-bats the way they did Thursday, proving pesky enough in small ways to make a difference in big ones.

“I know we’re good,” Mendoza said. “We’re up to the competition. And now, we’ve got to get ready for another good series.”