Sunday afternoon unfolding as it did at Citi Field indicated patience can be a baseball virtue. Christian Scott [1] had to wait eight days for his next start. Tobias Myers [2] had to wait nearly two months for his next major league appearance. Brett Baty had to wait until the eighth inning to enter Sunday’s game. Mets fans had to wait for Brett Baty [3] to do something/anything in order to experience some semblance of offense. On the other hand, Bo Bichette [4] was hurried to the plate one intentionally walked batter sooner than planned, and in retrospect, he couldn’t have arrived there soon enough.
This season, edging into its third-to-last week, wouldn’t seem to be an advertisement for patience, not this late. Yet we have alighted on that juncture when it might dawn on us that the whole shebang is winding down. New York Mets baseball, such as it’s been across the current campaign, inevitably gets missed when it is no longer available. If you were patient enough to hang with it, Sunday’s ballgame became the kind of contest a fan can look back on fondly when there are no Sundays with ballgames.
Ah, patience. We still have three weeks more of these Mets. Maybe we’ll get another game like we got this Sunday.
Sunday we got Christian Scott, who had extra rest built into his routine in deference to his completing his first almost full season after Tommy John surgery. He did not look worse for the idling. Perfect for the first three innings. A little unlucky in the fourth, when Jung Hoo Lee blooped in two runs for San Francisco. Removed in the fifth with two out, two on (second and third), and incandescent Rafael Devers up. Christian had thrown eighty pitches. Devers, up for a third time, would be a challenge. Andy Green opted to remove his starter, despite the starter having struck out the superstar twice. Switching in Nate Lavender was the right call in the moment. Lavender hazed Devers into a called strike three.
The Mets trailed, 2-0, and continued to trail, 2-0. Pitching and defense could do only so much, but it did what it could. Carson Benge made a superb diving catch on a sinking liner to get Lee cursing his luck and make sure Jonathan Pintaro could notch a scoreless sixth. Jonathan matched it without extraordinary glovework behind him in the seventh. A modest home team threat went nowhere in the bottom of that inning. Myers came on for the eighth. The erstwhile Brewer we were advised was going to be the icing on the Freddy Peralta cake had some ups as soon as he became a Met, then an onslaught of downs, culminating in demotion down to Syracuse. His first Met outing since July 11 indicated Tobias may have gotten his groove back. True, he did give up a hit to Devers, but it wasn’t a home run and it wasn’t with any Giant on base. Myers took care of everybody else to keep the score, 2-0.
Considering the zero belonged to the Mets entering the bottom of the eighth, it wasn’t an optimal ratio, but interim managers in particular understand no score is permanent until it goes final. There’s always a move to make in the eighth inning. In this eighth inning, it was sending up pinch-hitter Brett Baty to lead off against reliever Carson Seymour. Andy, we like the way you moved your pieces here. Brett homered to left, just beyond the spot where he just missed homering the day before. This was more effective. This got the Mets on the board.
Would this wake up all the lumber that had been daydreaming in the first base dugout’s bat rack? A.J. Ewing’s bat sure looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The rookie, who himself had sat for a night following an off day following a terribly off month, singled to left. First a homer, now a hint of a rally. Sunday was just getting going. Luis Torrens, of whom Shawn Colvin once noted every little thing he does is magic [5], sacrificed A.J. to second. Francisco Lindor had the bad fortune to get him ensnared in Jung Hoo Lee’s luck vortex. Lee had a hit fall in, then a hit robbed. In the eighth, he robbed Lindor. At least the play pushed Ewing to third for Juan Soto.
Tony Vitello preferred Juan Soto be pushed to first ASAP. That’s what the four fingers are for. That’s also what Bo Bichette batting behind Soto is for. Vitello figured Bo was an easier out for Seymour. Bo had to be thinking it sure is something to be considered so soft a touch that the opposing manager would sanction the placing of the go-ahead run on base in order to pitch to me in this late-and-close situation. Or words to that effect.
Juan Soto is pretty good. But, it turns out, so is Bo Bichette. Like Baty, he hit one deep to left. Very deep. Too deep for any Giant to do anything about it. The score was now Mets 4 Giants 2. Ewing touched home. Soto touched home. Bichette, after a well-earned glance into the third base dugout, touched home. The Mets were awake, alive, and ahead. If the Giants had a ghost of a chance, they’d have to do something with Kodai Senga’s ghost fork in the ninth. They did not.
Bo Bichette led the Mets to an exciting come-from-behind win [6] in September. Tobias Myers got the decision. Tell us that last March, and we’d ask what else about the offseason had worked so brilliantly. The recriminations of 2026 are old news at this point. Myers, like Scott and maybe Baty, has earned a little more consideration to show something for the future in the next three weeks. The future where Bichette is concerned is more up to him than the ballclub whose uniform he chose to wear this year for sure and the next two years perhaps. His contract contains annual opt-outs. Why anybody would opt out of a guaranteed $42 million per annum evades understanding, but players love to bet on themselves. This player bet coming to New York would be a good fit for him. It wasn’t for a while. These days he looks comfortable here. Bichette has played a solid third base, shown uncommon durability, and has been a steady performer at the plate since June. At those prices, you’d like April and May thrown in as well. If there is an April and May with baseball in 2027 and it has Bo Bichette still wearing Mets threads, it’s reasonable to assume there won’t be a ramp-up period devoted to getting settled in.
There was lots that was reasonable to assume coming into 2026. Assumptions went asunder. Baseball can be like that. Still, I’d take my chances with Bichette a Met in whichever year next includes baseball. I don’t have the patience to break in another make-or-break import. I look at a lineup that starts Lindor, Soto, Bichette, Benge, and I’m thinking this isn’t such a bad way to start a game, especially if it’s a game started by Scott, McLean, Thornton, and maybe Tong. We’ll get another glimpse of Jonah when he takes on a whale of an opportunity versus the Marlins. He’s had to be patient this season, too.
In that perfect world Huey Lewis knows there’s no living in, our four young/youngish arms would lead the way into 2027 and the years beyond. It is not intended to spoil a dream scenario to say that even if it works out in the short term, long-range forecasts are necessarily murky. Let’s get these kids through this season on as much rest as they need to progress and stay healthy. Next years are different kettles of fish, especially for pitchers.
Myers picking up Sunday’s victory made it 24 different Mets pitchers posting wins in 2026. “Wow, with that many winning pitchers as of September 6, the Mets must be doing REALLY great!” It was mentioned on the way out of the telecast that two-dozen Mets getting at least one win is a franchise record. The staff has certainly spread what wealth there is to share, with only Nolan McLean having more than five wins thus far. We don’t really stress too much about relievers notching or not notching wins. Managers and the executives to whom they answer care less and less about it where their starters are concerned. As we saw with Scott on Sunday, preservation for the entire schedule rather than perseverance for a couple more innings (or one more batter) is paramount.
If somehow you could guarantee Nolan McLean, Christian Scott, Zac Thornton, and Jonah Tong could stick around for a decade, presumably excelling as they endure, you would. Establishing that kind of rotation is unusual, especially in the modern era. Keeping it spinning under the Mets umbrella is where the scenario is too dreamy to be real. Player movement being what it is, wishing upon a Met probably shouldn’t be done en masse for more than a season or two at a time.
And a quartet of Met starters lasting across a period spanning ten years as starters? Even if they’re not Met starters for each of those ten years? How likely is that to happen?
Choosing our parameters carefully — 10 starts by four Mets pitchers in the same year, then 10 starts by those pitchers nine years after — we can say it’s happened only twice. Surprisingly, none of it involves the fearsome foursome of Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, and Matlack, for they never started 10 games apiece on the same Met staff. If the Mets had kept Ryan, or Matlack gotten more of shot sooner, we might have three examples. Instead we’ll go with the two we have.
In 1987, the Mets assigned 10 or more starts to seven different pitchers. In 1996, four of them — Dwight Gooden [7] (25 starts for the 1987 Mets), Sid Fernandez [8] (27), David Cone [9] (13), and Rick Aguilera [10] (17) — also made 10 or more starts. None of them for the Mets, mind you. Even if they were no longer Amazins nine years later, it’s pretty amazing they got to the end of this arbitrary decade doing what they’d been doing when it began. Gooden, 32, was suspended from baseball from the middle of 1994 through the entirety of 1995. He wound up with some team for whom he threw a no-hitter in 1996, making 29 starts in all. Cone, Gooden’s teammate again, missed four months of ’96 recovering from the removal of an aneurysm. Before and after his malady, he made 11 starts at age 33. Fernandez, also 33, was handed the ball to begin games for the Phillies 11 times that year. The wild card in this hand is 34-year-old Aguilera, who took a sabbatical from what had become his closer role since leaving the Mets to make 19 starts as a Twin in 1996. He’d return to relieving exclusively for the rest of his career.
In 2017, the Mets assigned 10 or more starts to seven different pitchers. In 2026, this very year, four of them — Jacob deGrom [11] (31 starts for the 2017 Mets), Zack Wheeler [12] (17), Steven Matz [13] (13), and Seth Lugo [14] (18) — have also made 10 or more starts. None of them for the Mets, as you may have noticed. Even if they are no longer Amazins nine years later, four starting pitchers who’ve navigated time’s flight and stayed aloft probably deserve some sort of cap tip for their longevity. Lugo, at 36, is kind of the Aguilera of this iteration. We remember him more as a reliever, but he always had a starter inside him, and this season he’s made 29 starts for the Royals. Matz, 35, is back in the bullpen for the Rays, but this season wasn’t 60 games old before Steven logged 11 starts for Tampa Bay. You likely weren’t seeking a reminder of the stalwart nature of 36-year-old Wheeler, but he’s 24 starts deep into his 2026 with Philadelphia, and he’ll probably be busy in October. DeGrom, who’s managed to stay mostly healthy in the season he blew out 38 candles, is up to 27 starts. Like Wheeler, there’s a decent chance we’ll see him before the season is over.
In 2027, it would be marvelous to project double-digit starts for the four youthful pitchers we wish to lean on. To project down the road on their behalf is the stuff of a dream scenario. Dream away if so inclined. Maybe first let’s see what Tong does in Miami.