In a lost season, the least the Mets could do was not get beaten by Freddy Fucking Peralta.
That wasn’t quite the only thing I wanted from the dregs of 2026, but it was pretty close to it: Sure, lose eleventy billion games while playing dull, uninspired baseball. Just don’t get beaten by the failed Met acquisition whom I’d come to loathe with a mildly worrisome intensity.
And hey, for a few minutes things looked promising. Francisco Lindor [1] led off the game with a home run. Three of the first four Mets to face Peralta tallied hits, a familiar sight that left me cackling on my couch in rainy Brooklyn.
But I recall a warning about laughing last. Those three first-inning hits were all the Mets would get for the night. (Yes, seriously.) Peralta settled in, allowing a number of drives to the warning track but nothing beyond it. Meanwhile, an increasingly disconsolate Sean Manaea [2] was throwing decreasingly effective pitches to the Rays. The game was tied and then the Mets were behind by a little and then they were behind by a lot and I’d gone from fuming to numb.
Numb, but not shocked. Because I’d known the Mets would get beaten by Freddy Fucking Peralta. In fact, I’d had this series circled on the calendar as certain to deliver that humiliation. The starting rotations would wind up just so, Peralta would be far more effective than he’d been in orange and blue (or orange and blue and black, or creosote and purple), and the Mets would lose [3].
(Still left on the calendar: Pete Alonso [4] storming into town like the wrath of God and clubbing luckless Met pitchers like seals. Though — key difference — there’s no animus there. I’d prefer the Polar Bear not do terrible things to us, but it won’t feel like a personal affront when he does.)
The lone bright spot of the night was Dylan Ross [5] escaping ectoplasm. Ross was briefly on the Mets’ roster in 2025 but never got into a game, joining the ranks of the Met Ghosts — and with the asterisk of never having played in a big-league game. There are now five of these doubly unlucky Mets among our 17 spectres: Billy Cotton, Terrel Hansen, Connor Grey [6], Dan Hammer [7] and Bryce Conley [8]. On Tuesday Ross evaded that fate and became a real boy, earning his place in The Holy Books with a 1-2-3 inning — and on his birthday, no less.
That was nice, even if nothing else was — well, unless you count my opportunity to relearn a lesson I thought I’d already known. Don’t look to baseball for justice — its taste runs more to maddening ironies.