The blog for Mets fans
who like to read
ABOUT US
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.
Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.
Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.
Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)
Need our RSS feed? It's here.
Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.
Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.
|
by Greg Prince on 10 August 2026 2:44 am I’m happy the Mets have won five of six when they’ve won the five of six, right here, right now. I have no choice in the when of the matter. No use asking where this was when the Mets were in the portion of the season that determined their fate. Five out of six would have been nice every six days from Opening Day forward. These five of six will do in the present.
But the one they got Sunday, when they pounded the Pirates, 11-1, in Pittsburgh, would have been really apt to have occurred eight days earlier, when the 1986 Mets reunited at Citi Field. The Mets lost lifelessly that Saturday. The 2026 Mets did a lot of lifeless losing for months on end. Those months took or perhaps gave us a break this week. Again, we’ll welcome the life-filled winning now that it’s arrived, even if we are tempted to contact customer support to ask why it took so long in getting here.
Still, this most recent win — with its five hits from Bo Bichette, its four ribbies from Luis Robert, Jr., its seven dominant innings from Sean Manaea, and its dollop of feelgood icing via the major league debut of unheralded Jack Weisenburger — would have fit very well inside 1986. We beat the Pirates seventeen of eighteen games that year. Our one loss, the opener of a twi-night doubleheader at Three Rivers, was an undercard to the main event, a fight between Bill Robinson and Rick Rhoden, which naturally became a battle between every Met and whichever Pirate wished to be whupped. Robinson, then our first base coach but once upon a time Rhoden’s teammate in Pittsburgh, was sure Rhoden was scuffing the ball and let the opposing starting pitcher know it. You had to scuff the ball if you wanted to beat the Mets in 1986. Rhoden didn’t care for the accusation and responded with a profanity and a push. The two went at it, and they were not alone.
“The brawl that ensued,” reported Marty Noble in Newsday, “included separate confrontations between Jim Leyland and Ed Lynch, and Kevin Mitchell and Sammy Khalifa. Roger McDowell and Pirates reliever Jim Winn were among the four people restraining Darryl Strawberry. Lee Mazzilli [still a Buc that June] said he was punched in the head by Strawberry.” Davey Johnson referred to the melee as “another real one” for the ’86 Mets, who ten days earlier went at it with the Dodgers, and in July would take on the Braves and the Reds in conflicts that eluded the box score, save for the impact of ejections. The Pirate fight was the only one of the four that took place in a 1986 Met loss.
Seventeen other times, the Mets slapped the Bucs around in the baseball sense. The Mets slapped the Bucs around on the scoreboard in that twi-nighter’s nightcap. The Mets slapped almost everybody around in the baseball sense all day and all night in 1986. It was beautiful. Winning the pennant and World Series were great, too. No wonder those guys get invited back every ten years.
Although Sunday’s romp felt comparable to any number of the Mets’ 108 wins from 1986, it had no numerical doppelgänger from four decades back, no 11-1 win from the season of Baseball Like It Oughta Be. There was, however, one win that came very close, a 10-1 thumping of the Braves at Shea on July 12. Deliciously, it came one day after the 11-0 throttling of Atlanta that encompassed Mets vs. the World III, the one in which David Palmer, frustrated that his former batterymate Gary Carter had whacked him for a first-inning three-run homer and punctuated it with a resounding curtain call, attempted to send a message to the next batter. The next batter was future preacher Darryl Strawberry. Darryl today delivers the Lord’s message. In those days, you didn’t mess around with Darryl Strawberry and expect to be greeted with forgiveness.
Palmer hit Strawberry in the rear end. Straw charged the mound’s front end and the pitcher on it. The pitcher, perhaps seeing his life flash before his eyes in the person of No. 18, flung his glove at Darryl. First Palmer threw to the wrong target, now he was throwing the wrong object. This brawl was short-circuited, Jack Lang wrote in the News, when “plate umpire Jerry Crawford grabbed Palmer and Braves’ catcher Ozzie Virgil tackled Strawberry. Keith Hernandez came off the bench and got into the middle” of the scene, seeking Palmer for himself. The heart of the order stuck together.
Nobody was ejected. Palmer continued to pitch. Carter nailed him in the second inning for a grand slam. Maybe he should have asked Crawford to toss him in the first.
The next day was the 10-1 win at Shea that will serve as our precedent for Sunday’s 11-1 win at PNC Park, the one I sort of wish could have happened on 1986 Reunion Day. That 10-1 win on July 12, 1986, works perfectly in this scheme of things because it happened on Old Timers Day. The Mets were celebrating their 25th anniversary in 1986. Technically it was their 25th season, so the math never looked right on the 25th-anniversary sleeve patch, marking 1962 to 1986 as it did. The next time they went commemoration-crazy was for their 40th, which they held off on making a logo for until 2002 rather than going for it in 2001. The 1962-2002 motif made aesthetic and arithmetical sense. The mood around it wasn’t terribly celebratory, however, because the 2002 Mets weren’t much to celebrate. It really helps to have a festive backdrop when you’re commemorating.
 Not that the Mets from 1962 through 1994 needed a milestone to bring back players from their past, and I don’t mean as Recdivist Mets. They used to hold Old Timers Day every year. Still, 1986’s loomed as distinct because of the quarter-century theme. The Mets were old enough to have a substantial history behind them, yet young enough so that almost everybody who constituted it was still around to honor it. A whole host of Original Mets were on hand. Al Jackson. Charlie Neal. Frank Thomas. Jay Hook. Craig Anderson. Chris Cannizzaro. Ken MacKenzie. Generations-spanning Ed Kranepool re-met his Met mentors. And first pick in the 1961 expansion draft Hobie Landrith was there, presumably to ensure there’d be no passed balls. That, famously, was Casey Stengel’s reasoning for selecting a catcher before choosing anybody else when the existing National League teams exposed everybody they didn’t want to keep. But back at Shea a couple of dozen years later, Hobie stuck a pin in Stengel’s logic balloon:
“The Mets got me primarily for my defensive skills. but I had more passed balls when was with the Mets that one year that I did all my other years. Because in the Polo Grounds, they painted the Chesterfield sign on the scoreboard with this glossy green paint and I’d always lose the ball in that sign.”
The record shows the most passed balls charged to Landrith in any one season was 10, in 1956, when he was a Cub. And photos show that by 1962, Chesterfield’s advertisement of yore had been supplanted twice, first by Knickerbocker, as the Giants shifted their primary come-on from cigarettes to beer, then by Rheingold, the Mets’ first signature sponsor. Also, when Jay Horwitz transitioned from head of PR to alumni director in 2018, he got in touch with Landrith, who told Jay it was the first time anybody from the Mets the Mets had called him since they traded him to Baltimore for Marv Throneberry. Maybe Hobie’s invitation to 1986’s affair came by mail.
Old Timers Day in all their permutations aren’t cherished for the flawless accuracy of the participants. Sometimes their stories came closer than you’d suspect to real life. Tug McGraw, retired for two years as of 1986, remembered giving up “a grand slam single once” when he was a rookie. The hit in question was indeed a single and it did drive in four runs, but it wasn’t of the Robin Ventura ilk. A future Shea Stadium postseason icon did hit it, though: Donn Clendenon. And three Pirates were indeed on base for Clendenon. The Mets of 1965 weren’t much progressed beyond the Mets of 1962, so when Tug said “the ball had gone past about seven people,” which was why every runner in sight scored on a single, well, his recall 21 years after the fact wasn’t too far off when you read Jack Lang’s game story from the next day. Maybe not seven people, but there were two errors on the play. One of them was on McGraw.
“A lot of similar stories flowed around the Old Timers clubhouse, like draft beer at a stevedores convention,” Mike Celizic wrote in The Record of Hackensack. “They were told by pot-bellied men of middle age, most of them silver-haired and through bifocals. But for an hour, they stood on the green grass of Shea again, signing autographs in brand-new Mets pinstripes.”
On some level, that’s the attraction of every Old Timers or Alumni or Reunion congregation. This one’s attraction was that it attracted so many who made the Mets the Mets, whether they lost 120 games or were on their way to winning 108. “This is the reunion of reunions,” Bud Harrelson said. “It’s like dying in your own arms.” The 1962 Mets who were invited to don their specially made racing stripe unis were delighted for the opportunity to tell their tales to whoever would listen, especially each other. “I’m not saying being on the ’62 Mets was like being in a foxhole,” MacKenzie said, “but when we all get together, it’s like guys who spent a lot of time together in the same foxhole during a war.”
 Regardless of rank or decoration, every Met Old-Timer was treated as a returning hero. A couple of Met Old-Timers transcended the event but didn’t overwhelm it. Hall of Famer Willie Mays was there. Hall of Famer Duke Snider was there. They took the field in the company of Doc Gooden. The trio was introduced as “two Hall of Famers and a future Hall of Famer.” As with Landrith’s or McGraw’s memory, one applies a grain of salt to that script. It was a day to believe only the good in Metsdom. Keith Hernandez took in the backstory of the franchise he had joined just over three years before and grew reflective for (bearded) Dan Castellano in the Star-Ledger:
“The 25th year means a lot to me. When a history of this club is remembered, I want this club to be remembered with the 1969 club. When I’m 50 and come back for Old Timers Day, it will be a prideful day.”
When Hernandez was 50, during the 2004 season, Old Timers Day was on hiatus, so good thing he made the lower-wattage 30th-anniversary gathering in 1992, one of the last the Mets held until they pulled out all the stops for the 60th in 2022 (nobody had to call Keith to make that one, as he was already up in the booth). The 25th, which got Keith thinking long-term, featured a plethora of ’69 and ’73 alumni, natch, but also Mets who might have slipped through the cracks of a less diligent organizing committee. Ron Hunt. Joe Torre. Roy McMillan. Bob Apodaca. Carl Willey. Everybody was introduced to a crowd that didn’t let pregame rain stop them from applauding. An Old Timers game was planned, but the field, notoriously slow to drain, was deemed a little too wet for the safety of the retired players. As was, Jerry Koosman slipped emerging from the dugout to tip his cap.
The field was deemed fine for the active roster of July 12, 1986, and those Mets stayed on their feet, using them to kick the rears of the visiting Braves for a second day in a row. Rick Aguilera filled the nominal role of Sean Manaea, going seven strong innings. Aguilera (the only member of the 1986 World Series roster not to make the 40th-anniversary reunion) had struggled most of the season to that point, and fifth starter represented a bit of a hole in the rotation. The start on Old Timers Day pointed Rick toward the consistency that quelled one of the last concerns Davey Johnson had about his pitching staff. If this outing wasn’t as heartwarming as 28-year-old Jack Weisenburger’s reaction to coming up from Triple-A and throwing two innings of shutout relief in front of friends and family on Sunday…
“It’s a moment you dream of. When they told me I was coming to the big leagues, it didn’t hit me, and then I got here and I see my parents, my brother, and my wife — it’s the best thing to happen to me.”
…it was certainly something to feel good about. “That’s a shot in the arm for him and for us,” Davey said of Aggie.
Lenny Dykstra came closest to Bo Bichette’s 5-for-5 on 8/9/2026 by going 4-for-5 on 7/12/1986. Gary Carter and Darryl Strawberry each chipped in three hits, neither inspiring any of Atlanta’s four pitchers (none of them position players) to make contact with anything but New York’s bats. The Mets collected fifteen hits in all in Pittsburgh in their 11-1 win Sunday. The Mets collected fifteen hits in all at Shea in their 10-1 win that long-ago Saturday. Yeah, too bad this 2026 echo of 1986 wasn’t in the cards when the 1986 Mets were in town for their fortieth. Too bad little of 2026 has evoked 1986 other than the anniversary connection. This current team has been fun for almost a week. That lauded team has been fun for eternity.
Doing themselves proud was nothing new for the 1986 Mets by July 12 of that championship season. Those Mets raised their record to 33 games above .500 and stretched their lead in the NL East to 12½ games. They certainly did their predecessors proud, particularly the first batch.
Hook: “You look at this team now and they have super talent.”
Cannizzaro: “I knew sooner or later they would be this good.”
Landrith: “Player for player you take this roster and I don’t think there’s a team that can stack up against them.”
No inaccuracies there.
by Jason Fry on 9 August 2026 7:53 am If you had plans Saturday night that didn’t involve watching the Mets, well, I applaud your life choices.
Robert Stock was unlucky at first and then had no one to point the finger at unless a mirror was involved, which led to him being left out on the Pittsburgh mound to take a beating. (The modern game being what it is, postgame talk was all about whether the lack of pity for Stock means Jonah Tong will be summoned to apply whatever he’s learned in Triple-A.) Meanwhile, the Mets did basically nothing against Bubba Chandler. The final score was 9-0, the same tally applied in case of a forfeit, which would have saved Stock’s arm some wear and tear and the rest of us some time.
Luis Torrens did pretty well, all things considered, in his two innings on the mound. Is that something? No. No, it is not. I did have to laugh when I saw Torrens get called off on one play: Does a position player pitching mean he too has to be treated like a mildly interesting visitor to the diamond, there more as a tourist than a full participant? It’s not like Torrens had to really bear down and concentrate on his craft.
Oh, and have a thought for poor Gabriel Arias. We just saw the Cleveland utilityman when we were playing them; he botched a play against us, got booed by the crowd (which frankly seemed a little overdone) and wound up watching as catcher Austin Hedges was pressed into service. Now he’s a Met, and in his first game he winds up watching as catcher Luis Torrens is pressed into service. Things have got to get better, right?
Oh, and Carson Benge seems to be OK. That really is something. Not much, but something.
Five straight didn’t happen. Beards are safe. Don’t say no to interesting Sunday afternoon plans. The season chugs along.
by Greg Prince on 8 August 2026 2:44 pm Long after the Black Sox scandal shook the faith of fifty million people, yet well before SNY viewers were inundated with lingo-laden advertisements urging us to make the games we’re already watching more interesting, there was betting on baseball, right in the middle of a major league clubhouse — and I don’t mean the one Pete Rose was occupying. On Wednesday August 3, 1983, where the Mets dressed for home games, focus turned to a wager made by someone who regularly frequented the premises. If only Bowie Kuhn had known.
Actually, it wasn’t a secret. The evidence was printed in Newsday the day after the Mets won their fourth game in a row of what had been, until very recently, a completely lost season. The previous Sunday, the Mets swept a Banner Day doubleheader from the Pirates in stunning fashion, grinding out two twelve-inning victories worthy of placard praise, the opener by a score of 7-6, the back half, 1-0. The ending to the nightcap was a particular hoot, with Mookie Wilson burning a path from second base to home on a one-out ground ball that didn’t get turned into the 4-6-2 double play Pittsburgh attempted to execute. The Buccos left town not quite believing what they didn’t quite see, because when you looked for Mookie, all you saw was something going whoosh! The Expos arrived as the next victim. They lost the opening game of their series versus the Mets in more or less routine fashion. They attempted to even things up the night after. Nothing about it could be called routine, unless you considered a final play you had never witnessed in your life until three days prior being repeated representative of the norm.
When you had Mookie Wilson, a spectacular ending could seem routine, yet it was always spectacular.
Return as if by time travel to the bottom of the ninth on Wednesday night, August 3, 1983, Mets and ’Spos knotted at one; Darryl Strawberry had smacked what interim manager Frank Howard called a “bang, gone!” solo homer in the seventh, making up for the lone run Tom Seaver allowed over eight sparkling innings. Mookie singles his way on base to lead off, just as he did in the twelfth on Sunday when the score was tied nothing-nothing (starter Mike Torrez had shut out the Pirates for eleven innings that day). Hubie Brooks bunts his teammate to second, just as he did on Sunday. Keith Hernandez is intentionally walked to set up a potential DP, just as he was on Sunday. Tom Carvel had to love the way this was going, because at Carvel, Wednesday was Sundae.
 The eerie similarities continued with George Foster coming to bat. On Sunday, Foster was the Met who hit a ground ball, that time to second. It was the ball Johnny Ray had a bit of trouble handling, which is why, after he forced a rampaging Hernandez at the bag nearest to him, the infielder who caught it, Pirate shortstop Dale Berra, thought it best to eschew the standard relay to first and sling the ball home. That’s where Mookie was heading, with third base coach Bobby Valentine’s vocal blessing. That’s where Mookie beat Berra’s throw.
Foster shuffled the script a bit on Wednesday by chopping a ball to short rather than grounding one to second. Montreal’s shortstop Bryan Little, “6” in your scorecard, did his part, flipping to the “4,” an Old Friend™ named Doug Flynn. Flynn had played with Wilson before being traded away from the Mets the same offseason the Mets traded for Foster. Flynn had played with Foster in Cincinnati before being traded to New York (with three other gentlemen) for Seaver. Perhaps Doug was flummoxed by all the familiarity in his midst. Nevertheless, he knew how speedy Mookie could be, so as Bobby V once again gesticulated Wilson home, he tried to complete a 6-4-3 double play.
George Foster was never particularly speedy, not on the level of Mookie Wilson, but all he needed to do here was hustle to first base. “The key, really,” Frank Howard observed, “was “George Foster getting down the line,” to which the skipper added the thought most closely associated with Hondo’s brief Met managerial tenure (thanks to it being cited intermittently over the ensuing decades by Howie Rose): “Ninety feet is the cheapest commodity in this business. You do it four times a game, that’s all we ask for.”
Foster delivered what was asked. Flynn’s throw to first baseman Al Oliver did not beat him to the initial sack. Now Oliver was holding the ball as Wilson raced for the plate. The man called Scoop threw home. It was too late. The man called Mookie had scored the winning run.
“I knew I didn’t have a chance to get him when I threw,” Oliver acknowledged. “All I saw was a blur on the basepaths.”
 All the Met players saw were the fruits of their labors ripening at last. They were still in last place, a mere 41-65, but 41-65 practically glitters when you were, four games earlier, a luster-free 37-65. “I am happy for them,” Howard said in Marc Maturo’s Journal-News gamer. “A lot of people have put us down — rightfully so — but they’ve hung tough and they’re battling.” Until the preceding Sunday’s doubleheader, the 1983 Mets had been almost pauselessly dismal, a quality shared with several of their predecessor squads when boiled down to one embarrassing fact. Up to this tiny stretch spanning July 31 to August 3, the 1983 Mets had never won more than four games in a row. The 1983 season had begun on April 5.
If your first reaction in real time to the Mets being poised to go for five wins in a row was “it’s about time,” you were speaking from more than recent scarred experience. The 1982 Mets had never won more than four in a row. The 1981 Mets, with two mini-seasons in which to accomplish the mean feat, had never won more than four in a row. The 1980 Mets, for all their Magic is Back abracadabra, had never won more than four in a row. The last Mets team to have won more than four in a row was the even more dismal 1979 version, the bunch that lost 99 games, yes, but had the good grace to win their final six to avoid triple-digits in the loss column.
“Let’s face it,” Mookie, now in his fourth season of not winning more than four in a row as a Met, “five straight has been a rarity around here.”
Nobody knew that reality, or may have been more smug about it, than somebody who was around the team regularly, one of the Met beat writers, Dan Castellano of the Newark Star-Ledger. We didn’t see Castellano’s reporting on Long Island, but if you read Newsday on Thursday, August 4, the day the Mets were seeking to win their fifth in a row, you learned Castellano — who had covered the Mets for the good folks of North Jersey since 1978 — had been betting on baseball. Worse, he was betting against the Mets. Worst of all, he didn’t care who knew it.
Before anybody rushed to summon the ghost of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, it should be understood Castellano was betting not the money in his pocket but the whiskers on his face. He assessed the talent that shaped the 1983 Mets while they were still stretching in St. Petersburg — when Strawberry was ticketed for Tidewater and Hernandez couldn’t conceivably be pried loose from St. Louis — and put the area adjacent to his mouth where his mouth was.
 “Also on the line today,” Steve Marcus wrote in Newsday in the hours leading up to the Mets’ drive for five on August 4, “is the Santa Claus-length beard of Dan Castellano…who has captivated the players and coaches with his wager in Spring Training that the Mets would never win five straight. ‘I don’t think it will happen,’ Castellano said last night. But he admitted he was readying his rusty razor.”
Castellano died in 2024 after a long illness, and was eulogized by those who worked with him as a truly admirable person. I can tell from immersing myself in his work on Newspapers.com that he was an essential resource to Mets fan readers lucky enough to live in his publication geography. Yet I stumbled across this business about betting against the Mets with his beard in 1983 the other day, and no matter how all in good fun the wager might have been proffered (Dan received a dinner if he was right), the whole idea made the hairs on my neck stand on end. I know you as well as any outside observer could and I think you suck so much you’re incapable of achieving one objectively excellent week over the course of six months. The nerve of Dan Castellano! Even if he was right about the Mets sucking! Maybe I shouldn’t take this bet so personally 43 years after the fact (44, taking into account that he’d made and won the same bet in 1982.) Maybe this was just what was done to pass the time between games before social media was invented, a development that has allowed modern-day reporters to post pictures of their sandwiches or take snapshots of the infield and caption them “my office for today”. Still, if ever there was a ready-made Met rallying cry, it should have been “Let’s Make Danny Shave!”
Back in the present day, when Mets telecasts are littered with come-ons to keep your bets from going “perpendicular” (or perhaps to ensure that they do; the oft-repeated lingo’s nuances escape me), the Mets have won four in a row for the third time this season, the first time since the end of May, which was more than two months ago. They have yet to win five straight this year. Last year they won seven straight in late July, then finished out 2025 by losing 35 of their final 56 games, never stringing together more than three wins in a row. What Mookie said 43 years ago this month applies. Let’s face it. Five straight is a rarity around here.
Yet today, five straight is within reach. The Mets swept the Guardians in Cleveland and then won their first game in Pittsburgh on Friday night, 6-4. They overcame rain and some late yips. They committed themselves body and soul to the victory, from Carson Benge crashing a wrist into the left field wall to make a brilliant catch (X-rays were negative) to Jefry Yan eschewing his customary leap to get down on the ground and make a critical tag at the plate after a pitch got away from Luis Torrens. Jared Triolo attempted to Mookie his way home from third, but he got Yanned. Jefry expressed his enthusiasm without going into orbit.
There were several big things to like, including Zac Thornton’s five shutout innings and Marcus Semien’s three-run homer, and there were a couple of little things I enjoyed, specifically Semien and Frank Howard’s descendant in interim managing Andy Green brushing off the inquiries of reporters regarding how this spurt of bristling Mets baseball differs from the drudgery we were beset by for innings on end pre-trade deadline. Each of them answered, in so many words, never mind what went wrong before, let’s be happy things are going well now, let’s keep getting better. I relish a good dwell within Mets history, but yeah, I’m with those guys. The 2026 Mets have stopped being the 2026 Mets and have become, for four, maybe five days THE 2026 METS! If it’s not quite as energizing as the summertime transformation of 1983 (when I was a lot younger, not nearly as cynical, and had no idea a Mets team clearly on the rise would not stay aloft into perpetuity), it’s fun as hell in the moment. We’ve won four in a row and we’re going for five! Yeah!
 But I can’t leave you hanging regarding that fifth win in a row from 1983. It never came. The Mets lost the Thursday afternoon finale of their set with the Expos, 2-1, despite Ed Lynch scattering ten hits across six innings and giving up only two runs. Charlie Lea lasted longer and pitched better. Castellano’s beard was safe that day and for the rest of the season. The Mets concluded their schedule at 68-94. They were now and again fun as hell, but still stuck in sixth. When Dan came to Spring Training in 1984, he could tell the Mets might jell, yet he couldn’t help himself, and thus made the same kind of winning-streak bet he’d made with George Bamberger in 1982 and 1983 — one that Hondo inherited after Bambi resigned — this time with the new manager, Davey Johnson, albeit with different terms. He explained his thought process to his readers in the Star-Ledger that April 10, after the Mets had brushed aside an Opening Day loss to reel off four straight Ws as their maiden road trip through Cincinnati and Houston touched down in Atlanta:
“Basically, what everybody is saying is not to jump to any conclusions after five ballgames. But it’s difficult not to. I’m scared to death, to tell you the truth. For the last two years, I have had a bet with Met managers…that the team could not win five games in a row. The bet was that I would shave the beard I have had since 1974 if they could do so. I still have the beard, so you know they haven’t done it.”
With the Mets on the upswing, “I made the bet with Johnson,” Castellano continued, but sensing improvement, it was raised to six in a row for the shave to be made. I do expect it to happen some time this year, but they could at least wait until I get home to let my family and friends see me one more time with hair on my face. This isn’t fair.”
Fairness to a beat reporter in the narrow context of whether he was going to have to dip into his dusty can of Gillette Foamy did not concern the 1984 New York Mets. They went out and won both games they played in Atlanta. Six in a row. Goodbye beard? Not so fast there, said the manager who was less interested in gloating than he was in his team staying hot.
“I won’t make him shave until we lose again,” Davey told the Journal-News. “I’m not letting him off the hook. I’m just postponing it.” Castellano by then was simply hoping the Mets, headed next to Chicago, would keep winning before returning to Shea, not from a sudden outbreak of cheering in the press box, but because, “I’d like my family to see it” — the beard — “one last time before it goes.”
The streak ended at six. The razor ended its exile. “One more note about the beard,” Dan told his Sunday edition readers on April 15 after the Cubs did his hirsuteness no favors. “The picture adorning this column is no longer valid. Having lost the bet to Dave Johnson (I said the Mets could not win six in a row), I reluctantly shaved it off Friday night. But it will be back. And it will probably be back a lot sooner than another six-game Mets’ winning streak.”
Let the record show the Mets next won six in a row in June. We were no longer in an era when that many straight was a rarity around here.
by Greg Prince on 7 August 2026 12:35 pm In the bottom of the first Thursday afternoon at Cleveland, Nolan McLean threw his first pitch and got his first out on a fly ball to left, making him the soul of efficiency. Then he threw eleven pitches to his next two batters, eight of them balls, giving him two baserunners to negotiate. The next batter singled to load the bases. The batter directly thereafter singled home the men on second and third, and he was in a 2-0 hole. Then there was a strikeout, a bases-reloading single, and a flyout to right field to escape further damage.
Twenty-six pitches. Two walks. One strikeout. An immediate deficit. Reasons for concern. Reasons for relief. Could have been worse. Could have been better. Not exactly the Nolan McLean Experience as envisioned when he made his major league debut almost a year ago, but not atypical of any Nolan McLean outing this year. He’s proven himself capable of piling up strikeouts. He’s shown himself prone to issuing a few too many walks. His stuff is rarely in question. His demeanor is advanced for someone who is still technically a rookie.
And his name is Nolan, which isn’t news. When he came up, it was hard not to meet Nolan McLean and not think, “Hey, a Mets pitcher named Nolan. Where have we heard that before?” It’s not unusual to latch onto something obvious early in player’s Met tenure. Little is more obvious than a player’s name. Nolan McLean didn’t have to pitch a damn thing like Nolan Ryan for us to make at least a cursory comparison. As if there’s any comparing Nolan Ryan to anybody who’s come along since him.
A Mets fan invoking Nolan Ryan is different from any other fan invoking Nolan Ryan. Those who knew him as an Angel, an Astro, or a Ranger know mainly the legend. Those who know him as a legend gloss over the details. Coincidentally, on Thursday night, hours after McLean and the Mets had completed their sweep of the Guardians via a 13-6 drubbing, I watched a program in which I did not expect Nolan Ryan’s name to come up. It was the Season Four premiere of Ted Lasso, and it involved a detour from the show’s familiar UK soccer turf to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City — Missouri, not Kansas. While taking it all in, visiting Brit Leslie Higgins is informed of Satchel Paige’s greatness. How great was he? The museum’s de facto docent tells Higgins that Paige pitched on the level of Cy Young (pause)…Sandy Koufax (pause)…
I note the pauses, because I anticipated the rule of three being in effect. Once I heard Young and Koufax, I wondered who would be the third avatar of pitching cited. I hoped it would be Tom Seaver, but figured that was unlikely. Seaver is everything to us, but not the kind of legend-at-large a show like Ted Lasso would inject into its conversation to make a point about greatness. Before I could think further on the subject, I heard Nolan Ryan. Yeah, sure, Nolan Ryan. They would say that. I remember reading shortly after he finally retired that, judging by polling and/or national endorsements, Nolan Ryan remained the most popular baseball player in America. The name Nolan Ryan retains an outsize mystique that transcends statistics, including those which might not match the numbers put up by his contemporaries or his successors. You know what they say about printing the legend, or at least writing the legend into the script.
 I’m just old enough to retain tangible memories of Nolan Ryan as a New York Met. Legend and greatness weren’t the words that came to mind when he pitched for us. Promise, yes. Potential, absolutely. Talent, undeniable. But man, was he frustrating. Seaver was my standard. Ryan wasn’t in Seaver’s league most starts. OK, nobody by my reckoning or universal understanding in the early 1970s was. Ryan also didn’t yield the same experience that watching Jerry Koosman or Gary Gentry or Jim McAndrew did. In short, none of those guys would lose the strike zone on a regular basis. None of them threw as hard as Nolan, but you tended to know where the ball was going to go once they released it. We didn’t know Nolan Ryan was going to go to Anaheim after the 1971 season, but regardless of the return the Mets accepted in exchange for his services, we couldn’t be surprised that the Mets were willing to say “enough” to waiting for his promise, potential, and talent to coalesce.
Because it was Nolan McLean making me think of Nolan Ryan after one inning on Thursday, I got curious to see if the granular results from a Nolan Ryan start for the Mets synced with my sense that what I was watching now was similar to something I had seen long before. I went to Baseball-Reference, called up Ryan’s 1971 game logs, and looked for a start from roughly the same part of the schedule we’re in now to see if McLean — highly touted in different ways from Ryan, and a lot more polished if not yet a finished product — was, in fact having a Nolan Ryan kind of outing…a Nolan Ryan Mets kind of outing.
On August 7, 1971, almost exactly 55 years prior to the day McLean was pitching in Cleveland, Ryan was indeed on the mound for the Mets. The game was in Atlanta. I recognized the circumstances. This was the game in which the Mets established their record for most runs scored in a nine-inning win, with a 20-6 thumping of the Braves. Twenty remained the franchise mark until the Mets crushed the Cubs, 23-10 in 1987, and that wouldn’t be topped until the Mets destroyed the Phillies, 24-4, in 2018. Whoever pitched that Saturday night at what was then called Atlanta Stadium wasn’t going to have to be that sharp to benefit from unprecedented Metropolitan offensive largesse. We put up three in the first, then seven in the second, capped by a Ken Boswell grand slam.
In between those explosive half-innings, Ryan was basically the Ryan I remember. After retiring Felix Millan on a grounder to start the home first, he walked Ralph Garr. A passed ball charged to Jerry Grote pushed Garr to second. Hank Aaron fouled out, but Mike Lum singled Garr home. Nolan hit Earl Williams with a pitch. Then he walked Sonny Jackson. The bases were loaded mainly on Ryan’s wildness. But then he struck out Zoilo Versalles to get out of the inning.
Two walks. One strikeout. Assorted angst. I don’t know how many pitches, because who counted, but Ryan, like McLean, eased himself out of too much ado, and with the nine-run lead he took into the bottom of the second, the angst dissipated. There’d be a walk apiece in the bottoms of the second and third, but Nolan left two men on in each frame. A 1-2-3 fourth preceded another Met outburst that raised the New York lead to 13-1. Maybe a smaller cushion would have meant a shorter leash for Ryan, but Gil Hodges and Rube Walker left him in through a rocky fifth. Four hits. One wild pitch. An RBI single for Williams. A three-run homer from Versalles. Now it was 13-5, Mets, which soon became 16-5, Mets. Ryan had his five innings. Barring a collapse of epic proportions, he was going to get the win. Today, he’d be done. This was 1971. He kept pitching. Gave up another run in the sixth, which the Mets got back and doubled in the seventh. With an 18-6 lead, Ryan stayed out there for the bottom of the seventh, when the only baserunner he allowed was on account of an error. One more walk, to Millan, to start the eighth, but Felix was erased on a double play. At 20-6, Ron Taylor was sent out to close out the rout.
Nolan Ryan’s line on August 7, 1971:
8 IP, 8 H, 6 R, 5 ER, 7 SO, 1 HR
Nolan McLean’s line on August 6, 2026
5 IP, 8 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 8 SO, 1 HR
Nolan the younger threw 94 pitches. Count is kept these days. Like Nolan the elder, McLean was off in his command, but when necessary, he could rear back and fire to optimal effect. There was a walk in the bottom of the second inning, along with a teal of second base, but there were two strikeouts and a grounder that put a halt to any threat. The bottoms of the third and fourth were Nolan McLean at his finest. Six up, six down, three Ks, two swinging. When the Mets went out for the fifth and built what was now a 6-2 lead, you felt pretty good about the youngster’s day. You were even willing to overlook some tentative Met baserunning, because a four-run edge is clearly going to be plenty for Nolan McLean.
 Clearly it wasn’t plenty. After striking out Travis Bazzana to start the fifth, the Guardians began to get the best of the Met starter. Chase DeLauter lined a single to right. Jose Ramirez added another single. Nathaniel Lowe, new to Cleveland, introduced himself emphatically to Progressive Field with a three-run bomb. Now it was 6-5. Now Nolan McLean was in hot water. Would he get out of it? When I saw him strike out Angel Martinez, I was sure he would. When he gave up back-to-back singles to Brayan Rocchio and Petey Halpin, I was kind of surprised he was left in to fend for himself. Surprised, but glad. I wanted the Mets to win the game and sweep the series, but mostly I wanted Nolan McLean to keep going, keep growing, keep becoming who we need him to become. Let’s see what he can do with runners on first and second while clinging to a one-run lead that until very recently had been a four-run lead.
We saw him ground out Patrick Bailey to end the inning. The Mets stayed ahead on McLean’s watch. There’d be a little more vexing Met baserunning, and the game would stay close following Nolan’s five innings, but all attendant anxieties wafted out to Lake Erie once Francisco Lindor reintroduced himself to Progressive Field with his own three-run bomb. The 9-5 lead (Luis Torrens and Marcus Semien had previously gone deep) meant Nolan McLean’s chance for the win appeared secure. Nate Lavender had pitched a scoreless sixth. Kodai Senga was about to pitch a scoreless seventh. The Guardian bullpen disintegrated in the eighth so thoroughly that Stephen Vogt’s best option to quell the Met attack became catcher Austin Hedges. By then, the Mets were up, 12-5, with two bases-loaded walks making an objective observer forget that the Met starter had control issues.
Each series the Mets have played the Guardians since 2019, five in all, has resulted in a sweep. The Guardians swept the Mets in August of 2025, and it encompassed three losses as devastating to our hopes as any we were dealt. All Met losses represented body blows in the wake of losing out on a playoff berth by a tiebreaker. We have no playoff race on the horizon in 2026. The Guardians have been in one, but losing three in a row to the last-place Mets from the other league kept them from forging progress at Progressive Field. With apologies to a very good friend of mine in the Midwest who loves his Guards like we love our Mets, their problem is not our problem. Nolan McLean was a little ragged around the edges in victory. Also not a problem, neither on Thursday nor in general, I believe. He’s gonna have outings where the five walks are going to tangibly bite him. And he’s gonna have outings where the eight strikeouts won’t be enough to save him when the Met attack is utterly quelled. He’s gonna have lots of outings as a New York Met, provided nobody accepts any ridiculous trade proposals in case his potential, promise, and talent show any signs of lagging.
When I think of Nolan Ryan as a New York Met, the legend is relative. When I think of Nolan McLean as a New York Met, the future is bright.
by Greg Prince on 6 August 2026 11:45 am “You remind me of Tug McGraw,” Gil Hodges told Ron Santo, regarding Santo’s heel-clicking routine that rubbed opponents the wrong way in 1969. “When he was young and immature and nervous, he used to jump up and down, too. He doesn’t do it anymore.” I’ve always loved that anecdote, recounted in The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, primarily because Santo was a Cub, and therefore anything he did to celebrate his team in view of our team was automatically offensive to me, even when I read about it after the fact. I loved Hodges stoically putting Santo in his place (which would eventually be second), because Hodges was our manager, and if there was a protocol Hodges preached, it was surely the correct one. Between you and me, had I been born somewhere near the North Side of Chicago, I might have come of rooting age convinced Santo was an avatar of affirmation and Hodges was an old stick in the mud. But I was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and my Channel 9 was WOR, not WGN. Gil’s dismissal of Santo’s antics will forever suit my tastes to a tee.
I don’t know what Gil Hodges from Princeton, Indiana, would make of Jefry Yan from San Rafael del Yuma in the Dominican Republic. Gil Hodges and Jefry Yan are from different eras, different worlds. But they have the Mets in common, specifically helping the Mets win when there had been little reason to invest faith in them previously. At the instant of his dig at Santo, mid-July 1969, Gil was managing a Mets club well above .500 for the first time in its history, tailing just one team rather than an entire league in the standings per usual. Yan isn’t nearly so accomplished, though it’s not like he hasn’t devoted his life to getting where he’s gotten thus far.
Jefry Yan was first signed to a professional baseball contract in 2013. The lefty made his major league debut on Wednesday night in this the year of our season 2026. You can already infer it’s been a long journey. His minor league log tells only some of the story. Two years in the Dominican Summer League, summers so far back that the Mets bullpen contemporaneously included Bobby Parnell and Jenrry Mejia. Jefry was in the Angels organization. It was under the auspices of the Angels that he went in for Tommy John surgery. Some pitchers emerge ready to go from the recovery and rehab process. Yan wasn’t one of those pitchers. He was released by the Angels and wound up out of baseball for a few years, working not innings but regular jobs. Per Tim Britton in the Athletic, “He enjoyed roofing…but not carrying refrigerators and other large appliances.”
A kid from the Dominican like Jefry Yan becomes a baseball player to become a baseball player, and not just for a cup of Rookie League coffee. Somebody turned off the spigot on him when he sought a refill, yet the kid never stopped pursuing his dream. He kept in shape and signed with the Marlins, pitching from 2021 to 2023 for their affiliates, making it as high as Triple-A Jacksonville. He pitched in the Arizona Fall League. He pitched in the Dominican Winter League. In 2024, Yan signed with the Seibu Lions of the Japan Pacific League. He didn’t pitch great, but stayed at it. He did better at a lower level in Japan. He got a contract from Colorado for 2025. You might think signing with the Rockies, last year the worst team in baseball, would represent an expressway to the big leagues. Yan got stuck on the on-ramp, generating a dizzying ERA in the hitter-first Pacific Coast League. The Rockies let him go.
The Mets saw something they liked in his stuff and signed him last July. The next time he pitched was not for a Met farm club, but back in the Dominican for two different teams, one of which, Leones del Escogido, won the Caribbean Series. Yan’s pitching began to gather momentum and attention. There were strikeouts and there were punctuations thereof. Video circulated of a man clearly enjoying his craft. He’d get strike three and he’d get vertical. Leaps into the air. Emphatic landings. Pumps of the fist. We of a certain demographic have been conditioned to raise an eyebrow at any pitcher who raises more than a glove, waiting for it to be tapped by his catcher. We also grew up watching Tug McGraw not always curbing his enthusiasm as much as Gil Hodges would have preferred.
Yan began pitching for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies in 2026. If you can’t express a little joie de vivre while calling yourself a Binghamton Rumble Pony, what’s the point of playing baseball? It’s playing baseball, not working baseball. Yan had already worked delivery and construction. This wasn’t that. This was a game, and Jefry was succeeding at it. Enough to be promoted to Syracuse. Enough to be promoted to New York after the trade deadline emptied out the experienced half of the Mets’ bullpen. Enough to be summoned by Andy Green to follow Christian Scott when Scott’s five innings of three-run ball proved a little too arduous to permit him to throw a sixth. Enough to face the playoff-contending Cleveland Guardians at Progressive Field on Wednesday night, marking Jefry Yan’s first time in a major league game.
He struck out his first batter, Angel Martinez. Conscious of his surroundings and aware of decorum, Yan calmly accepted a new ball from Francisco Alvarez and went about facing the next hitter with no show of outward emotion in your dreams. This was Jefry’s dream coming to fruition. Jefry Yan reacted pretty much as everybody who had seen the videos figured he would. He leapt. He landed. He pumped, both his fist and the demeanors of those pulling for his team. That cohort included his teammates, the hastily assembled ragtag band of also-rans who appear this week to be enjoying themselves more than they have in the totality of all the weeks that preceded this one in 2026.
 And feel Yan’s touch. There’s Yan, topping 101 MPH, throwing a scoreless inning and perceived prudence to the wind. There, the night before, was Nate Lavender, whose family, like him, had to travel an arduous path to arrive in Cleveland. Lavender was so happy talking to reporters that he was shaking their hands and thanking them for asking him questions. Yan outdid him for ebullience in the wake of what became a 6-5 ten-inning Mets win. His words en Español required a translator for American listeners to understand. His grin shouted the universal language of ecstasy. Whatever flair he brought to the mound, the kind a Hodges would have fined him for when managers could do that, wasn’t about showing up an opponent, he swore. It was all joy, all the time. Thirteen years to get to that mound and put up a zero while on it. You’d be crazy not to jump up and down.
These 2026 Mets are now the Mets of Yan and Lavender, along with assorted parts like another new reliever, Chayce McDermott, the 1,317th Met in franchise history and the first Chayce I’ve ever heard of. Chayce kept the Guardians off the board for two innings Wednesday. One of Chayce’s outfielders was Cristian Pache, Met No. 1,316. Cristian was hit two fly balls. He caught one of them. The fielding percentage isn’t great, but no runs were allowed while he was on patrol. Dedniel Nuñez returned from a long injury absence, and he wasn’t lucky enough to escape the effect of loose fielding, but just having Nuñez back was another boost. Jorge Polanco — the one the Mets signed in the offseason, not the one who’s been dragging around an ohfer the size of the state of Ohio — also materialized as if out of the blue. He homered and doubled, which was appropriate. Polanco had waited about as long to collect two hits in one game as a Met roughly as long as Yan, 29, had waited to be a big leaguer.
It was a back-and-forth game whose innate kookiness left its viewer willing to take any result that transpired. Chayce McDermott grounded out Chase DeLauter. Jefry Yan walked Steven Kwan. Balls were banged hard. Balls flew over fences. Hits were robbed. Hits fell in. A Guardians callup named Angel Genao (pronounced “hey now,” à la Hank Kingsley’s Larry Sanders Show catchphrase) collected four hits in his very first four at-bats. Jared Young produced a double and a triple. Leading off the ninth, facing his fellow British Columbian Cade Smith, he walked. Cade Smith sounds so much like Kate Smith, I’m tempted to start humming “God Bless America”. When Young came around to score the tying run, well, God Bless Our Canadian. In the tenth, a former Toronto employee named Bo Bichette recaptured the lead the Mets had let get away earlier by driving in slumping Francisco Lindor. Lindor couldn’t get a hit all night, but he did have the presence of mind to make the last out of the ninth, therefore guaranteeing he’d start the tenth on second base. On to protect our newfound advantage came our closer du nuit, Daniel Duarte. Devin Williams felt a bit of arm fatigue, so Andy Green used whoever he had. Duarte, who you’d call a 29-year-old journeyman if Yan didn’t already embody the nutshell, escaped both synthetic (ghost runner) and manufactured (a walk to DeLauter) trouble to nail down the save, his first as a Met.
I loved this Mets game as I’ve loved almost no Mets game this season. There’s not been much to love this season. The infatuation might be temporary, but a little life goes a long way. Yan might encounter enough naysaying to temper his huzzahs. Gary Apple and Todd Zeile analyzing Yan’s every giddy move during the postgame show might as well have been Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler straining to make sense of the behavior exhibited by an exotic creature they’d stumbled upon on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The Guardians, whose ranks include Chase Utley’s spiritual godson Rhys Hoskins, appeared perturbed that somebody in another uniform — in a Mets uniform — dare exude exuberance midgame. The Mets seem to have stowed the Spider-Man mask wherever they stashed the hard hat and vest. When Polanco, Brett Baty, and Carson Benge each homered, there were no physical props evident, just the kind of props teammates give each other naturally. When Yan came into the dugout with his first inning put in the books, he was welcomed as what he had striven so strenuously to be — a member of the Major League Baseball fraternity — and what destiny perhaps made him wait to be — a true New York Met.
by Jason Fry on 4 August 2026 10:56 pm Sean Manaea pitched … well, OKish in that he walked a ton of Guardians and gave up hits to more Guardians but somehow emerged from it only mildly scathed. Daniel Duarte, newly shot up the bullpen pecking order by vacancies, pitched well and so did Nate Lavender, finally getting to make his big-league debut. Kodai Senga even closed out the game in what’s being called an experiment.
Meanwhile, the Mets hit a bunch of balls really hard: Luis Torrens got them going with an opposite-field three-run homer as part of a three-hit day and Bo Bichette and Carson Benge added moonshots, with extra credit going to Benge for a laser-beam throw from right to short-circuit a Cleveland threat.
Let’s now turn to our analysis of what it means as the 2026 season continues to evolve … oh that’s right, the asteroid has arrived for the 2026 season and the rest of it doesn’t really mean anything.
Sure, Manaea continuing to look serviceable is a good thing; Senga as a bullpen power guy is a Why the Hell Not? idea worth exploring; and maybe a useful part or two will emerge from the scrum of new relief arms. Maybe the something useful will be Lavender, whose perseverance is worth applauding, and whose combination of odd release point and sneaky ride on the fastball is at least intriguing; maybe it’ll be one of the other guys with whom we aren’t yet acquainted.
(Take a moment, though, to feel for Bryce Conley, who arrived with surprise starter Robert Stock but was then DFA’ed. I noted Conley was called up from Binghamton and figured he was a young guy and so would probably get another bite at the big-league apple, but I was wrong — turns out Conley is about to turn 32 and Sunday was probably his shot at an MLB line on Baseball Reference. For now, he’s the 18th Mets Ghost, and the sixth stuck with the status of MLB phantom ballplayer.)
The rest of the season isn’t going to mean much. That can be freeing — it was fun watching the Mets win a no-stakes game against the Guardians — but the bedrock pointlessness of it all has a way of creeping into the proceedings so that the season decays into shrug time. How do we combat that? We don’t, really — you can’t trick yourself into paying close attention to two months of garbage-time baseball. What we can do, while the klieg lights are pointed elsewhere, is remind ourselves to celebrate the Lavenders and feel for the Conleys and hope for the Manaeas and Sengas. Maybe it’s not much, but it’s what we’ve got.
by Greg Prince on 4 August 2026 2:07 pm As I saw one trade after another announced in the leadup to 6 PM Monday, my impulse was to frame so many forced Met exits happening at once as some kind of massacre, à la the one that happened late on a Wednesday night a little over 49 years ago, the date of another trade deadline. Then I remembered the real massacre, in a contemporary baseball context, had already occurred. It commenced in late March and just kept going. Its bloody aftermath has been visible at the bottom of the National League East standings for months.
August 3, 2026, is not going to be mistaken for June 15, 1977, on any scale, yet the one similarity the fusillade of transactions we just experienced has to the blast of bulletins that assaulted our fandom as Shea Stadium reverted to Grant’s Tomb, is the Mets team suddenly expunged of Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman (and Mike Phillips) was summering in the cellar. Trading Seaver absolutely ended an era, but it didn’t push those Mets over a competitive cliff. They had already tumbled and were going to keep plummeting whether they maintained their ties to the Franchise or not. Maybe instead of going 64-98, Tom’s pitching and Sky King’s slugging might have powered them to 70 wins. The Mets flopping toward the end of the 1970s were beset by structural problems that no two icons, nor the assortment of players their departures returned, were going to reverse in the short term.
We were still entitled to miss them like crazy. Those trades, especially of Seaver, massacred our hearts and souls as Mets fans. They didn’t make much difference to where our team was going between June 16 and the end of the 1977 season. Our team was already going nowhere but down.
These trades of late July and early August in 2026 were surely coming, just as we knew — even if we couldn’t fathom — that Seaver and Kingman were leaving. Maybe some kid somewhere within the confines of Metsopotamia has lost his or her favorite player and is now questioning whether naming his or her cat Huascar was such a swell idea, but chances are the critical mass of regret, even among the relatively innocent sharers of our fandom, is minimal on this day after. The regret we feel now, whatever our age, was already forged in the fires of a Mets team we took on faith in advance as being no less than perfectly all right posting a record of 47-66 to this point. It’s the exact same record the 1977 Mets held after having played 113 games, and the 2026 Mets didn’t even have to trade Tom Seaver to get there.
Between now and the end of the 2026 season, I’d guess the Mets will probably be a little worse than they’ve already been. It would hard to be a lot worse. Considering that four of the seven major leaguers they’ve traded since Thursday night were their four most dependable middle and setup relievers, four arms sought by legitimate playoff contenders, and the Mets were still 47-66 despite having used those arms often and effectively…well, what’s the harm in the evanescent present? Probably that games we were losing by scores of 2-0 will now be lost by scores of 4-0 or 6-0. A bad bullpen can undermine a good team. A good bullpen can do only so much for a bad team. We could have kept every able reliever and the 2026 Mets would be who they are appear to be, the way Homer Simpson was quite obviously Homer Simpson when he took the Stonecutters oath.
HOMER: And by the sacred parchment, I swear that if I reveal the secrets of the Stonecutters, may my stomach become bloated and my head be plucked of all but three hairs.
MOE: Um, I think he should have to take a different oath. ‘Cause he’s already kind of heavy, you know…
 David Stearns goes about remolding the Mets. Luke Weaver of the Pirates, Huascar Brazobán of the White Sox, Brooks Raley of the Phillies, and A.J. Minter of the Twins each helped the Mets as much as he could, even if as a unit they couldn’t help the Mets be tangibly better. Thanks for the innings, boys. The temptation is to say “thanks for nothing” to Freddy Peralta of the Rays, and, honestly, I don’t have a “but…” rejoinder to such a graceless shove out the door. He did seem like a good dude, though, and I won’t begrudge him a future rediscovery of the touch that made him so attractive to us in January, especially if it has anything to do with keeping the Rays ahead of the Yankees. Clay Holmes and Tyrone Taylor are now Cubs. Holmes was a miniature success story as a Met, building himself from reliever to starter to de facto ace, only to be cut down in his Met prime by a batted ball, then sent packing before he could resume his Met prime healthy. I won’t detest seeing Clay Holmes pitch well in October, regardless of uniform.
Taylor is the only one in this septet to have made a notable positive impact on a postseason thrust that worked out. Tyrone engineered one hell of a plate appearance in the eighth inning of Game 161 of 2024, lasting eleven pitches and ending his time up with a double that chased Spencer Schwellenbach, setting the stage for all the Mets Classics heroics to follow. Taylor’s legacy — besides the awesome personality everybody talked up once he began making consistent solid contact — also includes a three-run homer that turned a Subway Series game in our favor and 26 regular-season pinch-running assignments, tying him with Wally Backman and Ron Gardenhire for eleventh place all-time among Mets who ran when called upon. Andy Green hadn’t used Taylor to pinch-run very much lately, possibly because to insert a pinch-runner, the manager needs to have a runner on base.
One thing that struck me about each of the guys the Mets traded was they all swore they really didn’t want to leave. They’d all been big leaguers long enough to understand the parameters of the trade deadline, that veterans on expiring/reasonable contracts with teams that have no chance of reaching the playoffs are prime candidates to move on. But they liked being Mets, even 47-66 Mets. I don’t know if there’s some implication to be mined that maybe a team that’s been trundling downhill since the middle of June in 2025 constituting a splendid place to come to work needs to toughen up in some way. No more hot water in the showers until you win five in a row! Nevertheless, I’m glad they didn’t renounce their Metsdom, even as their tasks will now include stepping right up to beat the Mets.
None among the traded was here all that long, and none was homegrown. It was the trade deadline. We were out of it. This wasn’t our first ruined rodeo. This was very much business. No Seaver aftershocks that project as resonating five decades after the fact. No regular recriminations similar to what one might still be feeling since Alonso left or wondering “WTF?” when I see Marcus Semien lofting a pop fly to shallow right, no matter what Brandon Nimmo is or isn’t doing in Texas. Some nights I lie awake deconstructing how the miserable 2025 stretch dive became the 2026 launch pad implosion. Couldn’t have we kept the guys who’d played a role in getting us close to the playoffs last year and figured a way to improve that team rather than blow the whole thing up, only to be surprised all we were left with was smithereens? The guys we traded or let walk during the winter were here a long time and a few were homegrown. They were intrinsic to what triumphs that qualify as recent. A little piece of me is always going to miss Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo. A significant piece of me has already forgotten Brooks Raley and A.J. Minter.
After attending and kvelling from Saturday’s 1986 reunion, I caught up on the in-game interviews our most glorious alumni granted Steve Gelbs. As usual, one of the most insightful respondents was Bobby Ojeda. Gelbs asked him about team chemistry. Yeah, Bobby O said, team chemistry shouldn’t be overlooked, but y’know what builds team chemistry? Winning. Lots and lots of winning. I’ve listened to the eventually traded 2026 Mets attest to how much they enjoyed being here, and I’ve heard some version of the same from those who are still here, and I’m concluding that chemistry is an elusive concept in this game. The 2026 Mets came outfitted with players who had accomplished fine feats elsewhere. The players who joined in the offseason were, for the most part, wanted by other teams, too. Most everybody in our dugout seems to dig most everybody else in the course of nine innings, or at least not outwardly despise one another so much that it’s obvious. Yet they never meshed collectively and hardly any of them achieved much individually. This team needs better chemistry, better players, better results. You didn’t need to be a previously acclaimed president of baseball operations to figure that out.
The bullpen that will attempt to finish out 2026 now includes Bryce Conley*, Jefry Yan, Nate Lavender, Chayce McDermott, and the presumably recovered Dedniel Nuñez. May the 4-0 and 6-0 losses be few and not on your head. Cristian Pache is the new spare outfielder. May as many nice things be said of him as were said of Tyrone Taylor. Whether the gang of prospects who are now in the Mets organization following the torrent of deadline deals will meaningfully alter the quality of baseball and quantity of wins down the road sits in the remain-to-be-seen bin. The kid from the Cubs, Jefferson Rojas, is said to be a comer with the bat. The kid from the Pirates, Sammy Stafura, not only brings a slick infield glove but a genuine lifelong affection for the Mets. His favorites when he was growing up in Westchester were David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Ruben Tejada. It’s the inclusion of Tejada that sells the authenticity. We love that sort of detail when we don’t know anything else about somebody who is insinuated without warning within our psychological ecosystem. We loved when we learned David Stearns grew up a Mets fan. If David Stearns was better at molding the Mets, we probably wouldn’t have been trading Luke Weaver for Sammy Stafura or anybody in early August. Somebody being a Mets fan makes for a marvelous morsel of introduction. Somebody making the Mets like they oughta be is what will make us adore him for decades on end.
Here’s to the new Mets, hopefully not the same as the current Mets, maybe someday as good as select editions of the old Mets. Maybe not quite the ones that featured Seaver in 1969 and Ojeda in 1986, but maybe somewhere in that realm. Hoping is what keeps us going. I’d say winning, lots and lots of winning, as well, but we haven’t done a ton of that this century. Yet at 47-66 here I am, still hoping.
*Bryce Conley was designated for assignment 38 minutes after the above was posted. Life, like the transactions wire in the wake of deadline day, moves pretty fast.
by Jason Fry on 3 August 2026 11:44 am Freddy Peralta, Huascar Brazoban and Brooks Raley have followed A.J Minter to greener pastures, with the likes of Luke Weaver and Tyrone Taylor still wondering if they will have new employers come Tuesday when the Mets and Guardians renew their (checks notes) utterly nonexistent rivalry.
I’ll spare you highly amateur scouting: I know no more than you do about Émilien Pitre, John Spikerman, Luke Gabrysh or the other newcomers to the system, beyond observing that the Mets are at least restocking their roster of interestingly monikered prospects. We’ll know them better in time, or forget all about them, or most likely it will be a mix of the two.
And I don’t particularly care, to be honest — I would have happily shed Peralta for a bag of street-fair tube socks*, and while I applauded our two former relievers’ work for the Mets, in a lost season most any return would have been fine for a free agent to be and a 36-year-old reliever at the likely peak of his value. Weaver’s fate remains the most intriguing trade-deadline question; given relievers’ innate unpredictability season to season, I’m not opposed to seeing him move, but it better be for a genuinely decent return.
The Mets at least took some of the sting out of this trade deadline by showing us by May that we could make other October plans, turning Departure Day into a when, not an if. But I’m still flashing back to the 2023 selloff, the last time the Mets hosed out the stables.
There’s a certain relief to definitively and authoritatively turning the page, but that doesn’t last: Pretty soon it dawns on you that the next seven weeks will be spent watching a jackass-carpentry roster, many of whose pieces will be discarded as square pegs by the time spring training rolls around. Remember Adam Kolarek, Jonathan Arauz or Sam Coonrod? Me neither.**
That won’t be fun, to say the least. On the other hand, the bleak trudge of Garbage Time 2023 was followed a year later by a wonderfully unexpected spring revival and a march nearly all the way to the World Series. The Mets will likely look very different come 2027,*** but they’ll probably have a corps of intriguing young starters and a not bad (at least on paper) offensive nucleus. You can dream on less, and goodness if you’re a Mets fan you already have.
* * *
Sunday’s actual game is best dispensed with quickly, as the Mets reminded us why this year has been so hopeless by getting zilch from a bases-loaded, no-out situation when they were poised to tie the Marlins or even take the lead.
The one exception was the unexpected sight of Robert Stock, whom Emily and I just saw on the mound up in Syracuse, and who made two starts for the Mets back in 2021.
Stock is an interesting guy with an intriguing bio, having plugged away in indy ball and overseas among stints with eight different MLB organizations; he was impressive this spring before being felled by thoracic outlet syndrome. He’s an engineer’s kid who’d built websites as a teenager, so last offseason he used Claude to create Stockyard Baseball, an open-source pitch model. (Meanwhile, I was drinking bourbon and buying shit I didn’t need.)
Stock made all of one bad pitch Sunday; he’ll turn 37 shortly after the World Series, so don’t expect him to be part of the long- or even medium-term answer. But he’s someone to root for before the curtain falls, and we’ll need all of that we can get.
* We’ll undoubtedly face him in Tampa Bay and I’m sure he’ll hit us with seven scoreless innings. I am already bitter.
** The only player to emerge from 2023’s Garbage Time scrum? Reed Garrett.
*** Let’s not discuss the looming labor war. It’s too depressing right now.
by Greg Prince on 2 August 2026 12:49 pm When it comes to retrospection in the moment, the 1986 Mets have become their own version of the 1969 Mets. That is to say, it’s damn good to see them after all these years. It may not produce the electrical charge it used to, but damn good is plenty good.
I attended, in the delightful and generous company of my dear friend Jeff Hysen, Saturday’s 40th-anniversary reunion of the 1986 world champions, the last Mets team (you might have noticed) to have won a World Series. I also attended Saturday reunions on the occasions of the 20th and 30th anniversaries, when 1986 was, respectively, a while ago, and a long while ago. Maybe because 2006 and 2016 were 20 and 10 years closer to 1986 than 2026 is — as well as far more contemporarily competitive — I could feel the Flushing air bristle with excitement at the sight of the not-so-old champs. We certainly wished in ’16 and ’06 that we hadn’t been left waiting for an encore, but until we got one, we had the ’86 Mets right here in front of us. The 1986 Mets were our beau ideal of baseball like it oughta be. They still are, I suppose, but their massive accomplishments are too distant to feel remotely present. Kind of like the 1969 Mets by the time we got to their 25th and 30th anniversaries.
The people who ran the Mets in the 1970s, even while running the 1970s Mets into the ground, never shied from the 1969 legacy. There was a 10th-anniversary Old Timers Day in their honor in 1979, as bottom of the barrel a season as the Mets have ever known. It was more than damn good to see the 1969 Mets 10 years later. As many of them who weren’t playing anymore showed up at Shea to remind us miracles were possible. In 1979, it was gonna take a miracle to get us thinking anything good could ever happen to this franchise. Little would have we guessed the greatest of all things was going to happen seven years hence.
The 1969 Mets came back as a unit in 1989, in 1994, in 1999, all after 1986, all after they were no longer the most recent world champion Mets. Just about every member of the team who had been let go unceremoniously (which was just about every member of the team) had returned to the organization’s good graces, and vice-versa. The business of baseball engenders understandable grudges. The romance of baseball erases them. When the ’69 Mets came back to be celebrated, they didn’t need to go through an emotional car wash to rid themselves of the grime of having been traded or released. They returned as the Mets they always were, the Mets they’d always be. And by doing so as blessedly frequently as they did, they became just familiar enough to not be exotic. The thrill of ohmigod, the 1969 Mets are here! in 1979 evolved by the 1990s to something more like oh, the 1969 Mets are here. It was damn good to see them. The electricity might have flickered.
Changes in stadia helped replug the ’69 Mets back into our central nervous system. It meant something that so many of them were on the field for the last day at Shea. It meant something more that so many of them gathered to be feted the next August at Citi. Citi Field felt barren and soulless for its four-plus months of existence. The 1969 Mets’ 40th-anniversary reunion consecrated the grounds. The facility was now a ballpark. When as many who could came back for the 50th anniversary in 2019, I daresay the atmosphere for their reunion bordered on electric. Those are the 1969 Mets! Right here! Ohmigod!
Perhaps it’s an adjustment for nostalgic inflation to glean that the 1986 Mets at 40 are approximately where the 1969 Mets were when they were 25 or 30. We who were coming of age as something approximating adults when the 1986 Mets were storming through the National League may have been reluctant to let go of our youth as readily as our predecessors. The 1986 Mets never didn’t seem at least sort of recent when they got together again. They weren’t invited to get together again for a 10th anniversary, either because too many were still busy playing or the people who were then running the Mets didn’t wish to acknowledge a team like the 1986 Mets once roamed our earth, so when the 20th anniversary came around, and the 1986 Mets came around to get properly toasted, our response in the stands veered between cathartic and orgasmic. Between 2006 and 2016, YouTube exploded, and we kept clicking on 1986 highlights. The recency barely budged when their 30th anniversary was celebrated, which was also the “ass in the jackpot” night Noah Syndergaard sought to send a delayed message to Chase Utley. The best message would have been “get the ’86 guys down from whatever luxury suite they’re congregating in, they’ll know what to do.” It had been only 30 years. Surely our champs were still in fighting trim.
On Saturday afternoon, the edge the arrival of the 1986 Mets brought to the event they headlined was limited to memory. Helluva memory, no doubt, but c’mon. It’s 40 years. They’re entitled to recede in relevancy. We know they were rascals and rapscallions in their day. We still love the seminal clips that compose the Proustian montages. We see them as avatars of another time. It wasn’t an Old Timers Day in name, but I feel qualified to say, as someone who is roughly the same age as quite a few of the 1986 Mets, a touch of gray kind of suits us, anyway.
Did I mention it was damn good to see them as they strode out two by two, leading off with the second base platoon of Teufel and Backman, and finishing big with main men Mex and Mookie? All but one of the surviving World Series teammates were on hand. They all got a nice hand. They all deserved 116 nice hands, one for every game won from Opening Night in Pittsburgh to the final out versus Boston. They did something only one Mets team did before them, something no Mets team has done since them. The latter reality may have had something to do with the diminished edge attached to the sight of them. The 1986 Mets are golden now. They don’t gotta fight for their right to party. They won the fight and still hold the title. It’s damn good to know that. And it’s damn good to imagine a 50th-anniversary reunion when we will remember they won practically every game they played but have lost the title of most recent Mets champions.
The 2026 Mets aren’t going to do anything about that part. They were considerate enough to wear the racing stripe uniforms of 1986, a beautiful complement to the ceremonial aspects of Saturday, but they had a hard time fitting into them, and I don’t mean because of tapering issues. To say the 2026 Mets are not the 1986 Mets is not a knock, for no Mets team is the 1986 Mets. After 112 games, the 1986 Mets held a record of 75-37 and led the NL East by 18 games; with 50 games to go, their magic number was down to 33. But the 2026 Mets are not a whole lot of other Met teams when measured by record. After 112 games, the 2026 Mets are 47-65, leaving them in last place, 19½ games out of first, nowhere near any Wild Card. The only magic number the Mets were counting down Saturday, as they quietly went about losing to the Miami Marlins, was how many hours remained until the trade deadline. The 2026 Mets have the same record after 112 games as the 1977, 1978, 1979, and 2018 Mets. Fifty different Mets team posted better records after 112 games than the 2026 Mets have.
Think about the 2026 Mets too long, and you’ll find yourself unable to generate any warmth toward humankind. Think about the 1986 Mets instead. Try not to think about how long it’s been. Just remember what it was like if you can. If it doesn’t get you hot and bothered like it once did, I truly believe you’ll still feel warm all over.
My friend Jeff has had a couple of members of the 1986 Mets on his podcast, National League Town. Listen in on his conversations with Roger McDowell here, and Darryl Strawberry here.
by Greg Prince on 1 August 2026 9:24 am The Mets held a Christmas in July promotion the other night, which apparently inspired a sequel of sorts on Friday when they conducted their business a little like it was the end of March. They had a starting pitcher slated to throw, but then decided they better not let that starting pitcher be seen, lest somebody get too good a look at him. That’s the thought process you hear about as Spring Training is coming to an end. You’re playing the Marlins in Jupiter or St. Lucie, but you know you’ve got the Marlins in the first series of the year, thus you don’t want to overly expose whoever’s lined up to face them for real in five days.
Friday night was something like that, except it was the end of July when such thoughts shouldn’t circle an organization’s head. And though the Mets were playing the Marlins for real, this had nothing to do with the Marlins. The Mets were concerned that somebody contemplating trading for Freddy Peralta would get too good a gander of Freddy Peralta and adjust their contemplation. Or, one supposes, they wanted to figuratively bubble-wrap Peralta, keeping him from harm’s way on his way out the door.
Too bad it didn’t occur to the Mets’ brain trust to deploy the Hide Peralta strategy shortly after breaking camp. A season in which Freddy Peralta had been kept from pitching for the Mets likely wouldn’t have been any less successful than the one in which he took the ball 22 times and gave up five earned runs every nine innings.
If this really were the final days of Spring Training, the Mets would have grabbed a minor leaguer from a back field to take Freddy’s Friday start. Instead, they checked that storage unit they maintain on College Point Blvd. to double-check that they had never gotten rid of Kodai Senga. Senga hadn’t pitched in about two weeks. For a team that’s made a habit of shuttling fresh and used arms back and forth from the minors, ever conscious of overuse, it’s quite a feat for a presumably healthy pitcher to go completely unused for a discernible stretch of time. An unsightly ERA might have had something to do with it, but it’s not like giving up runs discouraged the Mets from repeatedly using Peralta.
So Senga was the self-inflicted emergency starter Friday night and he was, for four innings, the best version of himself, certainly a damn sight better than any version of the Freddy Peralta Mets Experience. Only one Miami baserunner, no Miami runs, impeccable efficiency. The Mets weren’t doing anything on offense versus Janson Junk, but that was OK. Who pays attention to the score when you’re just trying to get through these meaningless games ahead of Opening Day?
Oh, that’s right. This was July 31. The season’s been going on since March 26. Yet it was hard to remember that for the Mets this counted as much as any regular-season game counted. Because it’s July 31 and the trade deadline is August 3, everything about this team that exited contention prior to April 30 is provisional. We kind of know who’s going to be traded, but except for A.J. Minter, they haven’t been traded yet. Shouldn’t use Peralta. Probably done using Brooks Raley. Luke Weaver is in limbo. Tyrone Taylor was hot for a few days, so he’ll be gone, maybe. Luis Robert, if he stays in one piece, might be a piece that gets moved. Really, there’s more roster certainty in St. Lucie in the final days of camp most Marches.
Senga got hit a bit in the fifth, and the luck that had been pressed evaporated. Xzavion Curry came on and didn’t budge, going five innings to finish out the 5-2 defeat accompli. Good for Xzavier Curry, who wasn’t a Met when the day began. He, along with the sticky Jonathan Pintaro, replaced Minter and the injured Cionel Perez in the bullpen. Pintaro is intermittently sent down but never seems to be gone. Perez was the bullpen’s answer to Jared Young for a couple of months, climbing from “hey, who’s that?” to “say, he’s not bad.” Sadly, Perez suffered a left forearm strain. Whatever plans the Mets had for him — higher-leverage innings or everybody-must-go inventory — had to be shelved.
Conceptually, the 2026 Mets fancied themselves buyers by the end of July. That was toward the end of March, when they had no idea they wouldn’t be one or two clever deadline deals from shaping a playoff-ready roster. The end of July has become the beginning of August. There will almost certainly be new players here soon. The story will remain the same. The Mets might win a game. The Mets might lose a game. The result will show up in the standings. There are Grapefruit League standings, too, but it rarely occurs to a sane person to look at them.
|
|
