Sitting in the Cubs dugout on Friday, Tomás Nido hardly left Jameson Taillon’s side.

The new Cubs catcher knew he was going to be catching Taillon’s outing on Saturday and wanted to be as familiar as he possibly could be with the Cubs’ righty.

“We were just talking on the bench all day yesterday,” Taillon said on Saturday. “He caught my bullpen before that. So, we were kind of just going through a crash course.”

Those two days helped, as evidenced by arguably one of Taillon’s best outings as a Cub. The 32-year-old struck out 10 Mets over 7 innings of 1-run ball in the Cubs’ 8-1 win over the Mets on Saturday.

The rapport that was built up in Nido’s first few days as a Cub culminated in an outing that looked like a veteran battery.

“It’s huge just because it gives you a little bit of a track record of catching him and seeing how his ball moves,” Nido said. “It just kind of builds up that muscle memory and just going today and going out there and having fun.”

Taillon picked up the first two outs of the game on strikeouts, then worked around a single to JD Martinez by forcing Pete Alonso to popout to first baseman Michael Busch in foul territory. But it wasn’t really clicking for him.

“I had a good 1st inning, but I didn’t feel great,” Taillon said.

A big, 5-run bottom half of the inning by the Cubs offense gave him time to refocus, recenter and lock in.

“You have a little bit more room to just be a little more aggressive,” Nido added. “So, it was awesome for us to be able to have that comfort and keep the game in our favor like that.”

That cushion allowed them to be creative in how they attacked the Mets’ lineup. In his conversations with Nido in the days leading up to Saturday, Taillon shared an idea of what he liked to do against righties and lefties “and then whenever you want, we can mix it up.”

Nido did that by calling for backdoor two-seam fastballs against righties, using his cutter in on lefties a bit more and mixing in the curveball to righties.

“Which are things that we’ve been talking about with the pitching coaches and with the catchers and now he went out there and followed through with it and was calling and stuff which was cool,” Taillon said.

The results were phenomenal for the Cubs

After the 1st, Taillon retired the next six batters he faced and cruised through most of the outing. He worked around of a 1-out, a first and third jam in the 4th and a solo home run to Francisco Álvarez in the 5th to post a dominant outing on Saturday.

“Everything was clicking, command of every pitch, strike one,” Nido said. “We talked about it before the game, we were able to execute it throughout the whole game and it made it really easy for me to have fun back there.”