Sean Manaea [1] 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 [2], newly shot up the bullpen pecking order by vacancies, pitched well and so did Nate Lavender [3], finally getting to make his big-league debut. Kodai Senga [4] even closed out the game in what’s being called an experiment.
Meanwhile, the Mets hit a bunch of balls really hard: Luis Torrens [5] got them going with an opposite-field three-run homer as part of a three-hit day and Bo Bichette [6] and Carson Benge [7] 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 [8], who arrived with surprise starter Robert Stock [9] 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 [10] 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.