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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.
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by Greg Prince on 4 June 2026 9:30 am Based on where the Seattle Mariners went last season and where the Seattle Mariners sit this season, it is fair to say that on Wednesday afternoon at T-Mobile Park, the New York Mets beat a playoff or at least playoff-caliber team. The Mariners made the postseason in 2025 and lead their division in 2026. The Mets missed the postseason in 2025 and linger in last place as 2026 goes along. Until further notice, the Mets’ only association with the concept of playoffs will come from interacting with teams in position to make them.
On days like Wednesday, you can tell yourself they are serving notice that they plan to strive toward being one of them. On Wednesday, it was they who looked like a team with which to be reckoned. Seattle couldn’t reckon with Freddy Peralta for six innings, or Bo Bichette getting four hits, or A.J. Ewing posting the first three-hit game of his nascent career. They couldn’t reckon with a double-steal attempt executed to a tee by Carson Benge, who swiped home, and Juan Soto, who slid into second safely. They were wrecked for good when Jared Young drove in Soto to build the Mets a 5-1 lead in the fourth. New York left town with a decisive 7-1 win.
What was so decisive about it? It compelled me to decide to look at the Mets’ record after 62 games and do a bit of baseball math. Baseball math recognizes 62 as 100 games distant from the completion of a regulation regular season. The Mets through 62 games have been, to put it kindly, unremarkable, having gone 27-35. Also unremarkable: the marine layer of National League teams above them, specifically the clubs that don’t lead a division.
Forget about the NL division leaders, except for when they are Met opponents. Atlanta is in another stratosphere right now. The Mets haven’t played the Braves once. Maybe that’s foreboding. Maybe that’s good timing. The Braves could hardly be any better than they’ve been to date (42-20). We’ll get them when they cool down. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We haven’t seen the first-place Brewers (37-22), and we still await the pleasure of a visit from the first-place Dodgers (40-22). That makes 22 games against teams I’ve just advised forgetting about. Precautionary selective amnesia will be helpful.
Back to that marine layer. It’s very foggy up there in the Wild Card standings. Who’s the powerhouse? Who’s the sure thing? Who’s ready to take command and make reservations for October? You can’t tell. It’s too foggy. At the moment, the three NL clubs that can claim Wild Card leadership are all in the same murky boat. The Padres (the Mets’ next opponent), Cardinals, and Pirates each paddle along four games above .500. On their heels or their hulls or whatever metaphor you choose, are the Diamondbacks and Phillies, each three games above .500; followed by the Cubs, two games above .500; the Reds, one game above .500; and the Nationals, one game below .500. That makes eight teams within two-and-a-half games of one another for three playoff spots.
The come the Marlins, who have crept back ahead of us by a game-and-a-half despite our having swept the gills out of them a few days ago. Then there’s us. We — funny how the first-person plural gets trotted out after a decisive win — are six games behind those three leaders in the foggy regatta. Lotta nautical traffic ahead, but if any of the other vessels floating out there has a motor attached to it, they sure haven’t revved it up. The Phillies, another outfit we haven’t directly encountered yet, had to win like crazy to approach mediocre waters after a start that was even worse than ours. Maybe they’ve already played their best ball. Or maybe they haven’t, but that’s OK, because that’s why Rob Manfred sanctioned three Wild Cards. (The commissioner also blesses Interleague play, and we still have some challenging assignments left on the schedule where that’s concerned, if no further trips to far away outposts like Seattle after this weekend in San Diego).
Everybody in the NL who isn’t the Giants or Rockies has a better record than the Mets, and it’s not as if they are static actors here. If three of those above us take off, and the three division leaders don’t drastically fall apart, well, enjoy the view from down below. But the Mets, freshly minted 7-1 winners over a playoff-caliber team from the other league, are absolutely eligible to make a move upward. One-hundred games remain to do something in that direction.
History suggests that the 2026 Mets will win somewhere between 24 and 66 of their final 100 games. The most any Mets team has ever won of their last hundred was 66, which happened in 1969. The 1969 Mets were legendarily 100-to-1 long shots to win the pennant. Imagine the odds you could have gotten that they’d win nearly two of every three of last their 100 games. Bowie Kuhn would have looked askance at such gambling parlance. Rob Manfred will gladly take your parlay and blow on your dice for luck if you ask. Given that 1969 was a once-in-a-lifetime baseball experience, let’s bet the 2026 Mets won’t match the franchise record of 66-34 down the 100-game stretch.
Let’s also be optimistic that the 2026 Mets will better the franchise low of 24-76, established by the 1962 Mets. What, you were gonna bet somebody else lost more of their final 100? Sometimes the obvious wager is the right one.
So somewhere between 24 wins at the low end and 66 at the high end is what we can look forward to the 27-35 Mets adding between now and the end of the season, pending any rainout that doesn’t get made up. That doesn’t happen too often anymore, but it has in the past, thus when I looked at last 100 games of a Met season for every Met season, I took “last 100 games” literally. In 1962, the Mets played 160 games to a decision, so that 24-76 reflects games 61 through 160. In 1988, the Mets weren’t bothered to make up two rainouts, so ditto. Same for the handful of 161-game seasons, the two strike-impacted seasons (1972 and 1995) that can be said to have had full enough campaigns (156 and 144 games, respectively), and the 163-game epic that was 1999. For this exercise, I opted to ignore ties. Mostly, when we refer to last 100 games, it means Game 63 through Game 162.
Here are the thirteen best records compiled by Mets teams over their final 100 games of a season:
1969: 66-34
1986: 64-36
1999: 64-36
1985: 63-37
1988: 62-38
2024: 62-38
2022: 61-39
1987: 60-40
2000: 60-40
2008: 59-41
1990: 58-42
2006: 58-42
2015: 57-43
Notice an overwhelmingly common denominator? Nine of these thirteen Mets teams went to the playoffs. The other four made things interesting, if aggravating. The baseline here is a .570 winning percentage, or a 92-win pace when extrapolated for a 162-game season. Play at a 92-win pace all season in the three-Wild Card era, you don’t have to worry about keeping busy come early fall. It helps if you don’t completely fall apart during your first 62 games, though the presence of the 2024 Mets in this group indicates falling apart as the season is taking shape isn’t always a dealbreaker. The 2024 Mets had the same 27-35 record the 2026 Mets do currently. If the 2024 Mets may not have quite represented a once-in-a-lifetime baseball experience à la 1969, yet it might be a bit much to ask for a statistical replica of what they did a mere two years after the fact. Then again, 1973 happened only four years after 1969, and with inflation, two years may be the new four.
Usually, however, a team playing like the 2026 Mets have through 62 games is showing its true colors. The 1996 Mets, for example, also went 27-35, a pace that would work out to 71-91 over 162 games. When the 1996 Mets finished playing their 162nd game, their record was 71-91. Other Mets squads stuck in the same strain of mud — 1977, 1980, and 2003 — saw their overall winning percentage only dip over the long haul.
You can mess around a little early and not not put on a 100-game surge for the ages, yet you can still get where you want to go. It doesn’t happen frequently, but it has happened twice. You do have to get blazingly hot eventually. The 2016 Mets built on a respectable but not otherworldly 32-28 start by going a respectable but not otherworldly 53-47 in their final 100, highlighted by a 27-12 run late. They wound up with one of the two National League Wild Cards. The patron saints of statistical outliers, the 1973 Mets, were 28-33 after 61 games, the exact same mark held by their successors in 1978, 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2017. The 1994 Mets went on strike after 113 games. Nobody in this cohort finished with a winning record. The 1973 Mets? They didn’t exactly catch fire as of Game 62 and keep burning clear to Game 161. They went 54-46, good for an 87-win pace over 162 games. Eighty-seven wins was sufficient to make the playoffs in 2016. Eighty-two wins, boosted by a very timely 21-8 step up, was sufficient to win the division in 1973. That’s what the Mets had after adding 54-46 to 28-33 and totaling 82-79 in an NL East where nobody else put together enough successful season segments to top them. The 161-game math worked so well that Game 162, when the grounds at Wrigley were suddenly judged soggy, was deemed unnecessary.
Some Mets teams that finished fairly strong, including the 1976 Mets (56-44), the 2001 Mets (56-44), and 2019 Mets (56-44), can only look back and rue that they didn’t start a little better or benefit from a more generous dispersal of playoff spots. I doubt the 1976 Mets, 2001 Mets, or 2019 Mets gather specifically to look back and rue, but I do like the image, provided they eventually brush aside their shortcomings and instead relish that they put together pretty nice stretches of baseball. Actually, I think it would be nice if each individual Met team got together.
Hey, Flynnie!
Hey, Swannie!
Have you seen Bomback?
He’s right over there by the crab puffs with Pacella.
Oh, man, his hat fell right onto the tray. Same old Johnny! Oh wait, he’s coming right here.
Hey Doug! Hey Craig! What are you guys giggling about?
Nothing, John. Nothing at all.
More relevantly, the only Mets team still in action can’t do anything about their tepid launch. The 2026 Mets are 27-35. History hasn’t shunted them aside, but history isn’t doing them any favors. Fortunately, history won’t matter if they can make great hay from their next 100 games…and not too many NL competitors do the same.
Baseball math can be complex, but it’s simple enough if you just start winning and basically don’t stop.
by Greg Prince on 3 June 2026 11:04 am “Give me the name of a baseball player.”
“Darryl Strawberry.”
“No, a real one!”
—Frasier and Martin Crane, Frasier, “A Cranes’ Critique,” Season 4, Episode 4, October 22, 1996
Dr. Frasier Crane and his brother Dr. Niles Crane, haughty denizens of Cafe Nervosa that they are, would probably shudder if the jingle for what they’d likely consider a pedestrian consumer product morphed into their private earworm (Frasier leaned more toward orchestral arrangements, certainly when it came to the theme for his own radio show). Yet after spending late Tuesday night with several of my senses focused on the Mets’ visit to their Pacific Northwest hometown, all I can hear in my head is the theme for a very unchic coffee, albeit with lyrics reflecting what I’d been watching with my own eyes.
The best part of stayin’ up
Is fly balls in their gloves!
Unlike the Crane Boys, I’m no connoisseur of coffee — never touch the stuff — but I have been beset by the recently revived Folgers tune. Saw a commercial featuring it, been humming it yet not regretting it, because I have repurposed it into an appreciation for the only element keeping me awake as the Mets otherwise continue to snooze in Seattle.
 “No, Niles, not the Met. The Mets. I don’t know what they are, either, but Dad seemed agitated by their presence.” It’s the fly balls and line drives hit to center and right, the fly balls and line drives that stay in the air just long enough to stoke dread, the fly balls and line drives ultimately chased down by A.J. Ewing in center and Carson Benge in right. I’m getting to the point where I’m stimulated as if by a burst of caffeine following those youngsters as they rush after them; home in on them; and place them in the out column. I count five such episodes from the Mets’ 8-3 defeat at the hands of the Mariners Tuesday. Three Ewing caught. Two were reeled in by Benge. Five vignettes of Whoa, that could be trouble, but wait, here comes a dashing, heroic figure determined to thwart impending doom. Suspense. Climax. Denouement. Prosaic on the scorecard, poetry in motion.
That’s for the balls that demonstrated the good graces to remain with the unfamiliar confines of T-Mobile Park. The fly balls that impolitely soared over its fences, ones that none among Ewing or Benge or, for that matter, Juan Soto could do anything about…well, they were a problem. Three problems altogether, accounting for six runs. And sublime outfield defense was of no use when, on the infield, a throw from Marcus Semien at first went “KABLOOEY!” and a stab by Mark Vientos at first went “CLANK!”, and Randy Arozarena went “CLOMP!” as his feet crossed home plate shortly thereafter.
The sound effects were not working in the Mets’ favor. The pitching was not working in the Mets’ favor. Benge’s two homers, each a solo blast, weren’t enough to overcome those definitive shots produced by Patrick Wisdom, Jhonny Pereda, and Julio Rodriguez. The worst part of stayin’ up was most of the game, actually.
Still, those kids and their fielding. Some nights that’s enough to keep ya dreamin’.
by Jason Fry on 2 June 2026 12:28 am What the Mets did to anger the baseball gods is an interesting question. So is what they did to MLB’s schedule makers.
There they were playing in the middle of the night on the other side of the country, starting their fourth West Coast trip of what’s still a young season, and given all that I’m surprised it went as well as it did.
The Mets got solid pitching from Sean Manaea and a pack of relievers, more superb defense from Brett Baty and A.J. Ewing, and solo homers from Jared Young and Marcus Semien. Unfortunately they got nothing else — those two solo shots were their only hits of the evening. Meanwhile, the Mariners countered with two solo homers of their own (plus two other hits, the showoffs), meaning the game went to the 10th tied.
I was watching blearily as Juan Soto failed to advance the Manfred Man, AKA Bo Bichette, and Gabe Speier ate Mark Vientos and Ewing alive. That brought A.J. Minter to the hill to try and contain the Mariners, and you could feel doom descend even before it arrived. Stolen base, little single to left, and the ballgame was over.
Honestly, I’d have forgiven the Mets a far worse showing. Fourth West Coast trip of the year on the first day of June? The Mets have spent a lot of nights in 2026 digging their own graves, but what did they do to deserve that?
by Jason Fry on 1 June 2026 7:16 am It’s good to win a baseball game.
It’s good to win a baseball game against the Marlins, who are a collective blight on baseball, an affront to the concept of not just team sports but also leisure-time activity, and a rebuttal to the idea that there can be joy and light in a cosmos riven by darkness and despair.
It’s good to win a baseball game against the Marlins by a score of 10-1 that culminates with an enemy infielder on the mound, even if said enemy infielder somehow lucks into a 1-2-3 inning because baseball’s bedrock property is that it never makes any sense.
Speaking of not making sense, just a weekend ago you wanted to hold a mirror up to the Mets’ mouths as they got swept at New Soilmaster Stadium. At Citi Field, against those same Marlins, the Mets looked like they’d replaced by an actual baseball team, sweeping the hideous fish and even nudging their way out of the NL East cellar. They hit! They played defense! They mostly pitched when they needed to!
Sunday’s laugher wasn’t all cackles, alas, starting with the fact that Nolan McLean‘s struggles remain hard to watch. McLean’s final line was an unlikely one: He got the win by managing five innings, allowing just two hits and one run, but he also walked five, ran seemingly infinite deep counts and was on the verge of disaster the entire afternoon. McLean’s most intimidating opponent during this perplexing stretch has been himself: His arsenal still looks good, as those two hits indicate, but his once-pinpoint control has deserted him, with pitch after pitch bending around the plate or drifting off of it. I suspect some kind of mechanical tweak — whether it’s his positioning on the rubber or something else — will let him reset and continue his progress toward ace status, but until he does it’s like hitting the ignition on your zippy sportscar, hearing the engine purr but then opening your eyes and seeing familiar red lights all over the dash. Not this again, you think, but yes, this again.
Even if the Marlins had broken through against McLean (their lone run came courtesy of the annoyingly good Owen Caissie), the Mets might have outslugged their starter’s issues. Carson Benge led off the game with a drive over the center-field fence, a suddenly less moribund Marcus Semien added a two-run shot in the second, and Luis Torrens delivered a key two-run single in the fourth. Plus they were supported by admirable defense, with Brett Baty and A.J. Ewing worthy of particular praise. Less praiseworthy: another game of inept challenging. Mark Vientos is impressively terrible at challenging and needs to be forbidden from patting his helmet if he even thinks an umpire might be in the vicinity.
The gamebreaker came in the sixth, though it was as much Marlins malpractice as Mets heroism. The Marlins had opted for a bullpen game after Janson Junk couldn’t go; in the sixth they sent Josh White out for his first-ever big-league inning. White got the first two Mets but then ran into trouble, walking in a run as his pitch count rose into the 30s. The Marlins inexplicably left him in to face Juan Soto with the bases loaded, which went about as well as you might have expected: White’s second pitch was a logy slider that sat in the middle of the plate, which Soto found to his liking and sent on a 433-foot journey to Souvenir Land. I like watching the Mets win by a comfortable margin but I hate watching baseball played negligently, and how you do that to a guy making his MLB debut is simply beyond me.
As has happened too often already this year, the Mets are now heading to the West Coast, where they’ll spend the next week playing at mostly ungodly hours. That trip also begins a long run of games against contenders, an unhappy reminder that a lot of the first two months’ stumbling and bumbling has come against less than robust competition. Playing in the middle of the night against actually good teams doesn’t immediately seem like a curative to me, but nothing about the 2026 season has made sense yet. So — as always in this life and probably the next — I suppose we’ll see.
by Greg Prince on 31 May 2026 9:30 am Saturday afternoon at Citi Field served as the site of several notable transformations. Christian Scott, previously 0-for-15 in his attempts to gain a desirable decision, became a major league winner. Hayden Senger, who bats ninth only because there’s no lower slot listed on a standard lineup card, reintroduced himself as a major league slugger. Bobby Valentine and Lee Mazzilli had spent decades as de facto New York Mets legends. Now they are certified New York Mets Hall of Famers. I couldn’t say I’d been to a game this year. That situation received an update, too.
It was a good day to find oneself inside this particular ballpark. It was a good day for the Mets to find themselves. They’ve pinged quite a bit between lost and found since snapping their dozen-game losing streak, usually settling into a state of lost, occasionally after it appeared they’d found some footing. No evidence exists that their current three-game winning streak portends genuine traction. There was a 5-1 homestand two weeks ago that led into a 2-5 road trip, with two more losses awaiting them when they returned to Flushing. If there’s a reason to infer maybe this time will be different, perhaps it can be divined from the definitiveness of the 6-1 victory over the Marlins. It wasn’t a laugher. It couldn’t be termed never in doubt. Yet for a refreshing change, you didn’t leave it thinking it could have easily gotten away.
You started it not knowing what to make of it. Scott’s dominance in the early innings was exhilarating. The offense was exasperating. Too many bunts and not a few boos. Yet the bats broke through in the bottom of the fourth, staking the heretofore deprived Christian (already with 8 Ks) to a 3-0 lead. His mission immediately became one of perseverance: get three outs without giving up three runs. Get yourself in a position to finally win yourself a game. Don’t give your manager an excuse to pull you back into ND or Worse Land.
It took 22 pitches on top of the 74 he’d already thrown. It meant bending just enough to allow one Marlin to cross the plate. It meant the bullpen heating up, because the bullpen is always set to simmer when Christian Scott gets as far as the fifth inning. But son of a gun, the kid did it. He got out of the fifth with his edge largely intact. If Christian Scott wasn’t Mike Scott at his Astro apex, he was at least reminiscent of Mike Scott from his Met apprenticeship. Mike Scott won fourteen games as a Met between 1979 and 1982. Christian Scott has now won one.
The latter-day Scott won because he had, among other assets, a 21st-century aggregation of Lee Mazzilli on his side. They don’t make ’em like Mazz anymore, but Mark Vientos — “Swaggy V” to some — at the bat drove home the first two runs on a double to deep left, while A.J. Ewing in center ran down the long fly ball that resulted from Scott’s final pitch. It was the kind of catch Mazzilli made with regularity, the kind of catch that had Mets fans in Mazz’s day certain of Lee’s impending superstardom. That and his Vientos-like flair.
When asked before the Hall of Fame ceremonies for his observations on the 2026 Mets, Mazz singled out Ewing and Carson Benge as his reasons for optimism, adding pitching is a must. Benge, like Ewing, made a very nice play on Saturday. The pitching during Scott’s start and following his departure couldn’t have been more effective. Cionel Perez, the lefty reliever getting warm behind Christian, brought his hirsute best to the mound in the sixth as he made his Met bow. Perez is the 23rd new Met of a season that’s barely a third over. You keep rolling out players, maybe you’ll get the optimal combination. Cionel was succeeded by better known quantities Huascar Brazobán, Austin Warren, and Devin Williams. The Marlins never meaningfully touched any of them.
Catching all of them was Senger, the fence-busting backstop who made a mockery of his placement in the nine-hole (Vidal Bruján batted eighth) when he lifted a fly ball in the seventh to left, a real Ralph Kiner special. Going…going…it just kept going until it was gone. Hayden’s was the second Met home run of the day. An inning earlier, Jared Young bopped his first of the season. Senger and Young thus joined Eric Wagaman and MJ Melendez in the sudden power surge club. The Roosevelt Avenue Irregulars are having quite a week.
I was delighted to take in the exploits of the current Mets, regardless of the thinness of their portfolios, but I was at Citi Field on Saturday mainly to celebrate the inductions of Mazz and Bobby V into the team Hall. My idea of a celebration is securing a press credential and asking a question at the inductees’ press conference. I did both. I asked Lee for his reflections on the Magic is Back summer of 1980, when for a few months a Mets fan could believe his perpetually cloud-shrouded ballclub had emerged into the sunshine of genuine contention. Mazz responded thoughtfully and generously. Valentine chimed in with some revealing and entertaining anecdotes as well. Neither came close to answering the specific question I asked (Bobby V wasn’t a Met in 1980), but it was their day. I’ll take down whatever they say and be appreciative they said it.
 Eras. Auras. I am appreciative that Bobby Valentine and Lee Mazzilli are Mets Hall of Famers. They constitute a Mets Hall of Fame class like it oughta be. Twenty-nine other franchises are not inducting Lee Mazzilli into anything. Maybe the Texas Rangers would give Bobby a bit of a nod for the boost he briefly gave them, but he, like Lee, is a Met all the way. His greatest successes were for us. And if you needed further proof that Bobby Valentine was a born Met, go listen to his speech. He spoke fluent Stengelese, albeit in his own dialect. My theory is Bobby knows exactly what he’s talking about and he’s gonna go from first to home to get to make his point whether or not a third base coach as skilled as he was in that role puts up the stop sign or not. Stray details might get called out on further review, but you’re not of a mind to challenge a thing he’s saying. It’s too much fun to listen to him.
I’m not much for interpreting body language, but I thought it incredibly telling that when Carlos Mendoza was doing his daily Q&A with the media and Mendy was thoughtful enough to acknowledge the Hall of Famers, who were already in the room, Bobby V rushed forth to the edge of the stage. It was all pretty informal, but a touch awkward, because, well, nobody had asked him to come to the front of the room. “Am I supposed to be up here yet?” He was told, politely, no. It was good for a laugh. It was also good for a reminder of how Bobby Valentine attracted the derisive nickname of Top Step from rival managers who didn’t care for his…let’s call it Bobbyness. Like I said, first to home without hesitation. The Bobby V ethos pushed us further than appeared possible in 1997 and kept us going clear to the final days of 2001. Bobby V can stand anywhere he wants. I doubt a Bobby V would get hired to manage by a modern baseball executive, but it’s a moot point. They don’t make managers like Bobby Valentine anymore.
Lee Mazzilli was demure only by comparison to his old roommate. Otherwise, Sheepshead Bay was very much in the house when he declared he might not be the best player in the Mets Hall of Fame, but he is the proudest. Like Valentine, Mazzilli’s leading qualification for induction into this august body might be his having been the avatar for his era. “The Lee Mazzilli Mets” evoke a place and time that nobody else could as easily front. Use any other Met’s name, and even if you don’t mean to, you come off as a little too ironic or even cruel. Remember the Lee Mazzilli Mets, and you remember the best days of some less than great years. Hell, I saw Lee and wanted to talk only about three splendid months from 46 years ago. Think I cared if that particular edition of the Lee Mazzilli Mets went 67-95 overall? They went 47-39 in the middle of the 1980 season. They stayed in the race until August. Tell me more! Tell me more! Oh, those summer nights…
“The Bobby Valentine Mets” also has a Budweiser quality to its shorthand. When you say Bobby V, you’d said it all as regards those teams that competed like mad, made the playoffs twice in a row, and went to the World Series the second of those golden seasons. You wouldn’t run the risk of being misunderstood if you referred to the Mike Piazza Mets regarding 1999 and 2000, but Mike was a celebrity before he got here. Bobby Valentine’s baseball career was colorful and intermittently accomplished before he took over for Dallas Green in August of 1996, but he really became Bobby V for the ages once he commenced managing the Mets. The Mets were certainly never the same, at least until he was dismissed and the Mets reverted to a little too much the same as they’d been pre-Valentine. More than any individual player who straddled the millennia, Bobby V was the Chemical X that explained our Mojo’s rise.
On my way out of Citi Field, I paused at the top of the Rotunda for an up-close look at the two newly installed HOF plaques. One for Lee Mazzilli. One for Bobby Valentine. That’s not what every Hall of Fame should have, yet it’s exactly what a Mets Hall of Fame needed to feel like it’s unmistakably ours.
by Greg Prince on 30 May 2026 10:07 am Bingo cards are all the invocation rage these days, as in “I didn’t have that on my bingo card!” serving as a response indicating a state of surprise in reaction to whatever unforeseen event has just transpired in this wacky world of ours. It’s an inviting metaphor if not always apt, yet let’s go with it as our leitmotif of the moment.
Let’s say we were issued a Mets-themed bingo card where under “B,” as in Batting, we find a box inscribed, “MJ Melendez pinch-hitting for Eric Wagaman, who was announced as pinch-hitter for designated hitter Jared Young.” Put aside the size that box would have to be to fit all that information. Had that bingo card fallen into our possession prior to Opening Day, we would have scanned it for boxes more likely to be filled in during the season ahead. We didn’t know what kind of season it was going to be.
It turned out to be the 2026 season. Thus, in the bottom of the seventh on Friday night at Citi Field, Carlos Mendoza indeed pinch-hit righty Wagaman for lefty Young because lefty Cade Gibson was pitching for the Marlins in relief of righty Max Meyer. With Mendy having made his move, Miami skipper Clayton McCullough countered, removing Gibson and inserting righty Calvin Faucher to face Wagaman. McCullough could do that because Gibson had faced his required minimum of three batters. Two — Bo Bichette (walk) and Juan Soto (single that sent Bichette to third) — had reached base, creating the kind of opportunity that nudges managers into making moves and countermoves. You might call the engagement between Mendoza and McCullough a chess match, but then you’d be mixing metaphors.
But it might be more apt, as Mendy proceeded to make another move: Melendez for Wagaman. Wagaman homered just the other night. Melendez has been mostly frigid since a warm start. Still, lefties face righties most of the time if possible. It was possible here. Melendez validated the chess match within the bingo game by effectively putting the ‘B’ in RBI, driving Faucher’s fourth pitch to left field, amply deep for a sacrifice fly to score Bichette and extend the Mets’ lead to 7-5.
Great, we had our B. What about the rest of what we needed?
Under I, our Bingo card had “I see the Mets have gotten off the schneid quite quickly this evening, pushing four runs across the plate in the very first inning, perhaps setting the stage for a rare easy win.”
Under N, we became eligible to circle, “Nope, Freddy Peralta isn’t going to make this easy, instead struggling to get only as deep as two outs in the fifth as starting pitcher, allowing the Marlins to score four runs, which are still fewer than the six the Mets have at this point, but wow, Peralta and his 94 pitches over four-and-two-thirds are hardly the epitome of efficiency.”
Under G, maybe as a sign these bingo cards were printed during Spring Training, we had, “Gads, if it’s 7-7 at the end of nine, with both teams looking mostly like they’re here to get their work in — especially the myriad arms called in from the Mets bullpen to succeed Peralta — just call it a tie.” And, although it is late May, would have you been shocked to have seen Mendoza and McCullough make like it was mid-March in Port St. Lucie or Jupiter and wave to each other from their respective dugouts, the universal signal for “no need to trudge on like this any longer, the early bird special beckons.”
Under O, we already had “Oh wow, Mark Vientos’s blast landed in the Left Field Landing or whatever that section is labeled as these days” from the third inning, but you know how it is with bingo. You need to have your rows and columns line up just so. What we needed was a box under O that read, “OH WOW! MJ MELENDEZ JUST SOCKED ONE ONTO THE SPONSORED SOFT DRINK BRANDING OPPORTUNITY!” Sure enough, that’s just what MJ the erstwhile PH turned DH did in the bottom of the tenth. Because it was the tenth, a fugazi runner was placed second before anybody batted, so what Melendez launched after Soto led off by flying out was a two-run homer to win the game, 9-7. All we needed was one run in order to manufacture an OH WOW! in that situation, and surely you’re familiar with the chant that ends with If Juan can’t do it, MJ can!
It had stayed 7-7 entering the home tenth, thanks to Austin Warren preserving the tie in the top of the inning. Warren as bullpen best bet to come through in clutch situations also wouldn’t have been on our bingo card when the season began, no more than the previously invaluable Tobias Myers becoming the reliever who gets shuffled down to the minors after a game where the starter doesn’t last and before a game that demands a “fresh arm” in reserve. Myers gave up the two-run homer in the eighth that made it 7-7, making his option more relevant than might have been forecast when the Mets acquired him alongside Peralta in January. But we’ve already proved how unreliable these hypothetical preprinted bingo cards can be as predictors of what will happen in this wacky world of ours.
First we shouted “MJ!” Then “BINGO!” Then the Mets collected their prize on our behalf, a modest streak constructed of two wins that could have just as easily been losses. Sometimes these games of chance work out to our satisfaction.
by Jason Fry on 27 May 2026 11:22 pm The Mets won … it just feels kind of like they didn’t.
Not only did they win, they also did some things pretty impressively. They ground out lengthy ABs. Most everybody pitched well, with Jonah Tong emerging from the scrum of openers and serial relievers with a win and Luke Weaver pantsing Sal Stewart to shut down an eighth-inning threat. Carson Benge had two key hits, giving you hope he’s come through his rookie hazing ready to take the next step forward. Benge and A.J. Ewing made some nifty plays in the outfield. Juan Soto hit a home run and so did Eric Wagaman, who recently escaped Met Ghost status and now has proof he’s fully corporeal, if not necessarily for real.
They won. So why does it feel like they didn’t?
The most obvious reason was Devin Williams recording what might be the worst no-runs-allowed save I’ve ever seen. Williams somehow emerged unscathed, but he left no nerve among the fanbase ungnawed, pitching like the love child of Armando Benitez and John Franco. Williams has a problem with tipping pitches, which we’ve known ever since Pete Alonso famously ambushed him, but he also has a problem with affect: He’s about the most hangdog closer I’ve ever seen, moping around on the mound like he’s being dripped on by a bespoke little black cloud.
There was also the fact that Reds kept jumping out of closets and springing up from under the bed and carrying on like Citi Field had become the world’s most overstuffed haunted house. The Mets didn’t record a single 1-2-3 inning, which is kind of amazing. This was one of those games where disaster always seemed imminent and yet never arrived, which is the better outcome but still leaves those spared twitchy and haunted and incapable of trust.
Oh, and there’s the Reds’ bizarre love of drop shadows, about a decade after everyone else figured out they were a bit much and banished them from the design playbook. But then the Reds have always been eager to screw up a perfectly sound uniform with a bad idea: unnecessary pinstripes, white hats, sleeveless tops, the version of Mr. Redlegs where he looks dead-eyed and psychotic, black accents where none are needed. Given the Reds’ sartorial track record, clinging to a pointless drop shadow is as Cincy as that repulsive chili.
(OK, that last bit didn’t really have anything to do with the game, but my God do I hate those dumb drop shadows.)
And of course there’s the fact that the Mets are godawful, and everything they do is either a reminder that they’re godawful or a fakeout that sets you up to be sucker-punched by their godawfulness yet again. (Haha! You keep falling for it, Mets fans!) That’s what’s really going on here: a season where the absence of disaster feels like a mistake.
But hey, for one night let’s not talk about that part. Because the Mets really did win. You could look it up.
by Greg Prince on 27 May 2026 12:20 pm “Look for the helpers,” Mr. Rogers implored, and the wishful thinkers in Mets management listened. They didn’t know who was gonna help in Mr. Met’s Neighborhood, but they’d keep looking. As of Tuesday night, the Mets had sought help from 48 players in 55 games. As of Monday afternoon, they had tried only 46 different players in 54 games. The search for helpers is constant.
Without Tyrone Taylor (injured), Jonathan Pintaro (optioned), and Nick Morabito (ditto), but with Eric Wagaman (recalled), Jared Young (activated), and A.J. Minter (reactivated), the Mets lost, 7-2, to the Reds at Citi Field. When Taylor, Pintaro, and Morabito were available and playing the day before, the Mets lost, 7-2, to the Reds at Citi Field.
Throwing bodies at the situation is not proving all that helpful at effecting change.
The main Met who didn’t accomplish anything worthwhile versus Cincinnati was David Peterson, who last week in Washington seemed to solve whatever had been ailing him as a starter. Peterson previously required the training wheels an opener provides — first innings were too scary for him. Trusted to go get ’em from the get-go, he pitched well against the Nats for five innings. Trusted to do it again against the Reds, he didn’t. He really didn’t. Peterson was in trouble early and mostly, bailed out from digging a far deeper hole by the specific strengths of Luis Torrens, baseball’s version of a special teams player. Torrens makes throws to second and tags at home so well he could be named an All-Pro Despite the contributions of our Backup Catcher For Life, the Mets were down, 5-0, by the fourth. The cruelest blow came in the sixth, when Petey didn’t back up the plate on an altogether messy defensive sequence. The pitcher’s brain freeze cost the Mets a base, not a run (the run, Cincy’s sixth, was gonna score, anyway), but it placed an italicized exclamation point on the entire David Peterson experience for the evening, as in Wow, that was really bad!
And it was for just about every Met. Maybe not Juan Soto. Juan Soto called time in the sixth to put on a brief fireworks show that accounted for two runs and distracted the crowd from its miseries long enough elicit a few oohs and a couple of aahs. His was one of those home runs that parted clouds. It was also one of those home runs that couldn’t close a six-run gap with one swing. Not Juan’s fault the Mets couldn’t win. Not any of 48 individual 2026 Mets’ faults at this point that the Mets rarely win. The aggregation of talent or whatever you’d term it hasn’t jelled in any 26-man format that’s been shaped. The latest iteration that includes Young, Minter, and Wagaman is no exception. Young qualified as a revelation during the slice of the schedule that hadn’t yet revealed itself a slog to nowheresville; he went 0-for-1 with a walk upon his return. Wagaman sat on the bench for a single April afternoon before someone noticed he was optionable; he had the honor on Tuesday of staying in after pinch-hitting and becoming the Mets’ 194th third baseman (ever, not just this year). Minter had been gone thirteen months; the scoreless inning he logged following Tommy John surgery and rehab should feel like a win to him.
Nothing feels like a win to Mets fans. Five losses in a row have piled up, sinking the club to eleven under .500, matching this season’s nadir and echoing the exact record of 22-33 from two years ago at this juncture. That was as comparably grim a scene as this one, yet the 2024 Mets turned their nosedive around and our expectations on their head, ultimately winding up two games shy of the World Series. A giddy and special time indeed awaited us as we soared from grim to Grimace. We couldn’t see it developing then. We sure as hell can’t see something like it developing now. The temptation is to say Grimace is not walking through that door, but having cycled through 48 Mets in 55 games, there’s no telling who’ll be playing for this team next.
by Jason Fry on 26 May 2026 7:55 am At the end of April I reclaimed my “have been to all 30 major-league parks” status with a trip to Globe Life Field to see the Texas Rangers take on the visiting Athletics.
 I’d like to tell you that the rest of this piece is a celebration of baseball, but alas it isn’t — beyond the common-sense note that watching baseball is always at least an amiable diversion, and so any place that allows you to do that is worth visiting. Someone on a message board described Globe Life Field as the world’s largest Embassy Suites atrium, and that’s it exactly — the Rangers spent a lot of time and money to engineer a hulking non-place, so steeped in anonymity that the baseball within it feels incidental. And they did so just a quarter-century after moving into Globe Life Park, which I visited in 2019 and didn’t think needed a replacement. (It lives on as Choctaw Stadium and now hosts soccer.)
The best seats at Globe Life Field don’t feel particularly merit the name, as everything feels like it’s happening in another county. The sound design is a particular miss: It’s boomy but diffuse, muffled and lost in so gigantic a place. I have no desire to see another baseball game at Globe Life Field, but I also wouldn’t bother to see a rock concert here.
 Some of the things that annoyed me at Globe Life Field, to be fair, are more about being a godless blue-stater in Arlington, Texas. The Rangers’ various doings are celebrated by the Six Shooters, a troupe of cheerleaders who prance around in jeggings and some-number-of-gallon hats — it’s very modern Texas, big and brassy and a little cringey. Less amusing is that the park is the new home of the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue, removed from public view years ago after community discussions about the history of the lawmen who gave the baseball Rangers their name and the role they played in anti-Mexican violence and stoking or failing to calm racial tensions. That was the broader context for the specific flashpoint, which was that the statue was modelled on Jay Banks, who became infamous for his conduct while leading the lawmen sent to stop desegregation at a Dallas-era high school in the mid-1950s, as captured in this searingly iconic news photo from the time. The team has halfheartedly claimed Banks might not have been the model for the statue, which is mildly hilarious given that Banks, the sculptor and the Texas Rangers museum are all on record that he was. (The Athletic has an excellent overview of the situation here.)
The history of the Texas Rangers is too big for this baseball blog, but this feels like an own goal, a move no one asked for that’s had the effect of alienating a chunk of a community one would presumably want to make welcome. Though this is the Rangers, the only MLB team not to host a Pride Night and one of just two to see maternity leave as too radical.
(They do, however, offer a sensory room.)
 The Rangers’ answer to questions like this is to say that they do everything they can to make anyone feel welcome, and to their credit that was true during our visit. Everyone we dealt with — from the cop explaining the labyrinth of parking lots to the 50-50 raffle guy — was helpful and nice in a way that felt genuine, and I’ll give extra credit to the folks at the fan relations booth. I stopped there to explain that I’d now been to all 30 parks and to ask if the Rangers had a commemorative button, as teams including the Marlins do. They didn’t, but a man at fan relations painstakingly and charmingly customized my visit certificate to note the achievement, a gesture I appreciated more than getting handed a button.
So anyway, Emily and I watched the Rangers and A’s play, including old friends Jeff McNeil, once-upon-a-time Cyclone Carlos Cortes and Brandon Nimmo. Nimmo was interviewed in canned pregame footage while tootling around in a golf cart; he was of course charming, and a guy helping people find their seats lit up in discussing the energy he’s brought to the team. It was fun to see Nimmo again, and to spend a couple of hours watching baseball — even if it was in the world’s largest Embassy Suites atrium.
* * *
What’s that, you say? This is a blog about the Mets?
OK, sure — but do any of us want to talk about the Mets?
I decided to turn off Memorial Day’s late matinee after the Reds extended their early lead to 5-0 against Nolan McLean, and by the time I got myself together to relocate it was 7-0, which wasn’t exactly an invitation to reconsider.
Turns out McLean’s rookie struggles were merely deferred instead of skipped, as he’s hit a rough patch that will demand adjustments to escape — understandable but still no fun to witness. The team continues to not hit at all, looking gripped by a collective nervous breakdown, and they can be relied on to fail in any of a number of other ways in a given game. Errors, mental mistakes, inept ABS challenges, simple bad luck? One or all of those things will befall the Mets if needed to push them closer to another loss.
It’s a long trudge into pointlessness, one that’s going to lead to firings and a fire sale unless some kind of miraculous turnaround presents itself, and the only hope to grasp at is that miraculous turnarounds by their nature don’t signal they’re on the way. We all know this and to belabor it further would be to add insult to injury. We just all — from agonized principals to helpless bystanders — would like it to end.
No comments, because I’m not in the mood.
by Greg Prince on 25 May 2026 12:52 am What does Christian Scott have in common with Bob Moorhead, Chris Schwinden, Brent Strom, Mike Birkbeck, Collin McHugh and Tommy Milone? They are the only pitchers in Mets history to start at least five games as a Met and never record a victory as a Met starter. Scott holds the record by a mile, with the no-decision he racked up Sunday in Miami serving as his fifteenth start in search of a win. The previous markholder was Moorhead, who never won in seven Met starts. Schwinden tried his luck six times. The others listed took five shots at a W. Honestly, Christian resides in an undesired statistical league of his own here, but I didn’t want him to feel as if he’s the only Met something like this ever happened to.
Unlike his predecessors in this category, Scott still has a chance to win a start for the Mets. Or he would if the Mets didn’t go about their business so Metsishly.
In his fifteenth career start as a Met, Christian was as good as he’s ever been, going five-and-two-thirds innings and allowing no runs. He could have departed as the pitcher of record on the winning side had his teammates given him one run with which to work. They did not. He shouldn’t take it personally. The Mets were shut out for the sixth time in 2026. In 23 of their 53 games to date, the Mets have scored no more than two runs. They are 1-22 in those contests. Christian Scott did not start all of them.
Sunday’s game stayed nothing-nothing from the top of the first clear to the bottom of the ninth. If Scott was on his game, so was everybody else who pitched for both sides. It was a good day most of the day to be someone who threw the ball. Like Scott. Like Huascar Brazobán, Brooks Raley, and Luke Weaver, who blanked the Marlins for a combined two-and-a-third. Like A.J. Ewing, who fired a strike from center to home to cut down the Marlins’ most imminent scoring threat, nailing Javier Sanoja running from second.
The arms had it. The bats didn’t. Maybe there was mound wizardry afoot from Tyler Phillips, Calvin Faucher, John King, Anthony Bender, Michael Petersen, and Pete Fairbanks, too. The piscine sextet must have done something right to notch nine scoreless innings. My guess is the Marlin hurlers held a meeting and voted to face Met hitters. Joke was on them, as the Mets don’t seem to have any hitters, just players tasked with hitting. Those tasks went largely unfulfilled, with the Mets gathering five hits all of Sunday. That’s both not very many and the most they put together in any of their three weekend games.
The bottom of the ninth’s trajectory seemed inevitable. Devin Williams, so good for so long, may have been due for an off outing, though if we’re invoking the “due” theory, the Mets players tasked with hitting were due to do something/anything, thus maybe due had nothing to do with it. Williams gave up a leadoff double to Christopher Morel, wearing only one thick schmear of eyeblack on each side of his face instead of his usual two thin whiskerlike lines that make him look like positively feline. Every time Morel bats, I announce to my wife, “Hey, it’s the kitty cat guy!” I wonder if he changed his cosmetic approach in order to appear more fierce. If he did, that Morel cat sure knew what he was doing.
A pinch-runner, a sac bunt to third, a walk that wavered in its intentions (three-and-oh; full count; ball four), and a fully intentional walk loaded the bases. There was one out. The Met infield was in. The Met outfield was in. The pitch Williams threw Heriberto Hernandez traveled too deep for any Met to catch, particularly once it cleared the fence. What left the bat as a harmful fly ball turned into an ostentatious walkoff grand slam. Once a Met loss was ensured, it didn’t matter — except to Devin’s ERA — that the final was 4-0 rather than 1-0, except losing by a final of 4-0 understates the futility of the Met afternoon. It was a game more futile than the final score suggests. Losing by four makes the defeat sound a little too routine, whereas 1-0 really makes the zero pop.
I’ve watched the Mets score very little or not at all nearly two-dozen times these past two months. I’m becoming a connoisseur in the ways of coming up empty.
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