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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 Jason Fry on 5 April 2026 11:18 am You probably know by now, but if not, here’s a bedrock principle: Baseball makes no sense.
If you were going to draw up a blueprint for success, odds are you wouldn’t opt for, “Let’s play terrible baseball and then excise Juan Soto from the lineup.” But that blueprint worked pretty well on Saturday night, as the Mets pummeled the Giants 9-0. It felt like they scored all night, but actually the final tally was built via a pair of eruptive innings against the Gigantes, to use the nomenclature from the hosts’ alt-uniforms.
Leading the way were a pair of forgotten men: The all-but-discarded Mark Vientos kicked things off in the second with a double, the first of his three hits, and the Mets capitalized on some Gigantes defensive tomfoolery to put up a three-spot. (Maybe Matt Chapman should catch the fuckin’ ball.) In the fifth, Bo Bichette and Vientos notched RBI hits before outfield afterthought Tyrone Taylor launched a three-run homer to make further hostilities rather cosmetic. (The Mets ended their night by going down one two three against second baseman Christian Koss, which was actually pretty entertaining.)
Not that Clay Holmes needed much help: He was about as good as he’s looked in a Met uniform, backed up by Tobias Myers. Holmes feels somewhat overlooked in discussing the starting rotation’s travails, but he’s quietly been very good for a season-plus, adjusting from the bullpen to starting duties ably and then making strides this spring in pursuing greater efficiency, which one hopes will translate into more gas in the tank come summer and fall.
The Mets will finish up their first of too many West Coast trips today, with Kodai Senga facing off against Logan Webb, and then return home for an MDs-and-executives skull session about Soto and his balky calf. How will they fare on Sunday? Will Soto play Tuesday? How would I know? We’ve already established that baseball makes no sense.
by Greg Prince on 4 April 2026 1:27 pm Met victories were so plentiful Friday night in San Francisco — for the club as a whole, for Nolan McLean, for power hitting, for clutch hitting, for remaining awake — that one is tempted to relegate to footnote status the little matter of Juan Soto exiting the game early with tightness in his right calf and requiring imaging to know more.
We don’t want to know anything at all when it comes to anything that could keep Juan Soto out of the lineup for more than the eight innings he missed after feeling something on his first-inning trip from first base to third. All we want to know is Juan Soto is inked into the two-spot every single day, unless Juan Soto needs to be moved to the three-hole. The Mets have played eight games this year. Juan has hit in all eight of them, including the one he had to leave. Whatever shortfalls the Met offense has experienced haven’t been because Soto hasn’t been slashing. Juan’s line is .355/.412/.516. Let’s hope those numbers don’t stay static for very long.
That anxiety addressed, what swell ways the Mets found to stop sucking! What a flirtation with perfection McLean gave us! He was through two when I began to think about it. He wasn’t in the fifth before I began to monitor my own behavior for impact on his performance 3,000 miles west. I noticed the full counts and the rising number of pitches, but I was nonetheless internally admonishing Carlos Mendoza that he better not be thinking of taking out a pitcher with a perfect game in progress, not when I’m doing my best to help the pitcher along by standing over here rather than over there.
On a surface level, I was buying into the kid’s chances. Deep down, I suspected I was mostly going through the no-jinx motions, and, sure enough, the sixth inning ended the late-night dream. After fifteen Giants came and went with none reaching base, Nolie walked a guy, then another guy, then, after one out, gave up a hit and a run, and I permitted Mendy to go ahead do what he had to do. McLean was removed after 93 pitches, having given it his all for five-and-a-third mostly sparkling innings. Few pitchers who struggled for command within individual at-bats ever looked so commanding taking care of every at-bat. Francisco Alvarez eschewed the services of interpreter Alan Suriel to describe for Steve Gelbs the quality of his pitcher’s stuff. “Nasty,” he said in fluent baseballese. Sounds right. We’ll try this again soon, Nasty Nolan. You’re worth toothpicking the eyelids for in any time zone.
Also worthy of eschewing z’s for was the catcher as he belted not one but two home runs, part of the onslaught that supported McLean and his relief successors in a desperately needed 10-3 triumph. Desperation comes early when first pitch is at 10:15 back East and your team has been trying your patience at decent hours. The Mets who departed St. Louis with hardly any runs on their ledger got going quickly and kept going incessantly. Alvy was joined in the dinger column by Marcus Semien, who it turns out still owns a bat. The veteran delivered three hits and three runs batted in. Mark Vientos continued to be viable, going 2-for-3. Bo Bichette went 3-for-5. Fifteen hits in all, six of them with runners in scoring position. Oracle Park’s circling gulls had little left to pick over once the Mets got through with Giants pitchers.
We’ll stay up all night for a result like this one. We’d rather not have to watch what an MRI machine reveals regarding Juan’s right calf, but maybe we’ll get lucky on that outcome, too. Just to be safe, I’m gonna stand over there rather than over here while hoping for the best.
by Jason Fry on 3 April 2026 2:11 pm Annnnd we’ve reached another milestone a lot earlier than we might have hoped: the season’s first game that I recap belatedly because I can’t stand the thought of reliving it.
If you didn’t see Thursday night’s game, well, good on you for making better life choices than I did. The Mets largely didn’t hit, yet again — and one of their offensive stars (to bend a phrase nearly to breaking) was Mark Vientos, whom this front office has treated increasingly callously since he stumbled trying to build on what looked like a breakout year.
David Peterson‘s location was abysmal and he got strafed; Sean Manaea showed few indications that he’s due for a resurrection, perhaps not a surprise since there’s been no credible theory for how this miracle is to unfold. The defense was terrible again, with this night’s chief offenders Peterson and Marcus Semien, who have a reputation as sound gloves and aren’t even being asked to play out of position. And yet again there was a dispiriting air of general heads-up-the-assness to everything the Mets did. The final indignity? The Mets went down meekly against former mate Blade Tidwell, whom they discarded with barely concealed disdain last summer and who was returning to the big leagues for the first time since being shipped away.
The Mets’ season has gone from “wooo that was great” to “well that’s a little disappointing” to “ugh they look flat” to “WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKERS” with head-snapping speed. Baseball teams are never as bad as they look when they’re playing like this, but right now that old adage isn’t bringing much solace. I suspect that’s because we all watched this team be every bit as bad as they looked for more than three months last year, and it still rankles.
That’s unfair in a lot of ways — new year, new personnel — but until the Mets show us something convincingly different, it’s an assessment they’ll be stuck with, and one they’ll thoroughly deserve.
by Greg Prince on 2 April 2026 11:02 am When the Mets aren’t winning every day, everything they are doing badly glares, while everything they are doing well hardly matters to us. The Mets aren’t winning every day. Everything, therefore, feels terrible.
The starting pitchers are doing well, doing the most you could reasonably ask for, at any rate. None of them hasn’t lasted less than five innings, which after 2025 translates experientially to going at least eight and handing the ball to John Franco on a daily basis. So huzzah for adequate length out of the gate and nobody within our rotation singlehandedly shoving the Mets in a hole early. Freddy Peralta’s second start, in St. Louis on Wednesday, kept up a pace similar to the one he set on Opening Day. Freddy went five, bore down when he had to, and persevered into the sixth. Ace enough for now.
Juan Soto is batting .346, buoyed by his first homer of the season in the Busch Stadium finale. Luis Robert, Jr., who already won the Mets a game, has his average above .300. It’s a small sample size, but Mark Vientos has reached .400. Those digits look mighty good.
When closer Devin Williams has had something to close, he’s shut it effectively. Brooks Raley gives up big hits only in strange dreams. Most of the bullpen has pitched capably in innings that don’t begin with a phantom runner on second. If you’re not automatically shuddering when a Met reliever makes an appearance, you can infer Met relief isn’t necessarily lethal to the Mets cause.
Good stuff in several places. But the Mets aren’t winning every day. In fact, they’ve lost three of their past four games, including the most recent one, a 2-1 defeat that took ten innings to wind down to its inevitable conclusion.
Everything, therefore, feels and looks terrible.
There isn’t just one elephant in the room. There have been 53 of them in scoring position since Saturday. Only six of them have scored. The Mets’ RISP output Wednesday was 0-for-11. That’s eleven baserunners situated to score on a base hit, and no base hits delivered. That’s a lot of elephant mess left behind. Can’t get runs in during regulation, suddenly you’re playing extra innings practically every day. It’s a strain on the bullpen. It’s more pressure to do what isn’t being done, which is driving a runner in from a base like second…which they give you just for showing up in the tenth and eleventh innings.
After six games, most Mets aren’t hitting, and even the Mets who are hitting aren’t driving in runs consistently. Maybe six games shouldn’t be played before the second day of April. Blaming the calendar probably amounts to misplaced frustration, but on this day in 1984, the Mets opened their season on what was then the earliest date in their history. It took being the opponent in Cincinnati, the site granted the Baseball-wide Opener annually, for the Mets to be compelled to strap it on so soon. In the past decade, when COVID and lockouts haven’t lurked, March has emerged as the new April. It’s instinctually too soon to be this dismayed by how the Mets are playing. Honestly, last week’s Opening Day romp notwithstanding, it’s too soon for the Mets to be playing.
But they are, kind of. They’re not necessarily keeping track out of outs while in the field (Lindor) and not necessarily taking care as they wander off first base (Lindor again), though you understand such lapses are the aberration and will not be the norm. You force yourself to go through the self-evident exercise of reminding yourself that six games, let alone the first six games of a loooooong season, are only six games. A 3-3 record that could be better could also be worse. Mostly, it could be practically irrelevant in the scheme of the next 156 games, save for the nagging fact that every game counts.
We’ve mastered basic arithmetic. We know six isn’t nearly as many as 156. Yet MLB implores us to watch our team from the very beginning of a season and take it seriously enough to bet on, never mind that we have conditioned ourselves from a tender age to wager nothing less valuable than our emotions on most every pitch. It’s not too soon to notice when something is off. It’s never too soon to turn such a situation around.
by Greg Prince on 1 April 2026 1:35 pm Editor’s Note: Today marks the beginning of a revolutionary new chapter for Faith and Fear in Flushing, as we unveil our innovative artificial intelligence tool fAfIf. As the season progresses, we will increasingly rely on fAfIf to report on select New York Mets contests, with an eye on increasing fAfIf’s ability to eventually achieve optimal blog efficiency. Right now, fAfIf is in beta test mode, but we are confident that a blog post composed by fAfIf will serve the reader as well as any written by our current staff of existing human bloggers. Please enjoy the first wholly fAfIf-composed post below.
When the New York Mets prepared to play the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, it was more than the fulfillment of a date on the Major League Baseball schedule.
It was an experience in the making.
The New York Mets represented an attitude. Cool. Sophisticated. The knowing nod of the Eastern establishment. The St. Louis Cardinals represented a tone. Loyal. Traditional. The hardscrabble assuredness of Midwestern values.
This wasn’t just a baseball game — it was an iconic clash of cultures.
The setting of Busch Stadium was more than a ballpark. It was a symbol of all things St. Louis Cardinals. The history. The success. The runs that had streamed across home plate like the nearby Mississippi River since the days of Pepper “Wild Horse of the Osage” Martin, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, and Joe “Ducky” Medwick. St. Louis Cardinals supporters who closed their eyes could almost hear the homespun dialect of Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean as he fired baseballs to his catcher Virgil Lawrence “Spud” Davis in a Redbird patois only the Missouri faithful understood.
The St. Louis Cardinals who took the field at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, weren’t just a baseball team — they were the extension of an emotion that dated back decades.
The name Busch Stadium wasn’t just an appellation. It was the manifestation of a familial connection generations of St. Louis rooters felt with their beer and their ballclub. Busch manufactured can after can of Budweiser and Budweiser Light, much as the St. Louis Cardinals offense hoped to produce run after run versus the New York Mets pitching staff.
The brands of beer weren’t just a product — they were a carbonated metaphor.
The Gateway Arch that overlooked Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, wasn’t just a nationally recognized monument. It was a portal into the soul of St. Louis Cardinals baseball. Stan “The Man” Musial. Bob “Hoot” Gibson. Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky. Under the geometric structure that stood erect along the shores of the Mississippi River, the Gateway Arch symbolized something more than a Gateway to the West.
The Gateway Arch wasn’t just an arch — it was a suggestion of a baseball game yet to come.
The starting pitcher for the New York Mets at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, was to be Freddy “Fastball Freddy” Peralta. He was more than a pitcher. He was a moundsman. Peralta approached his pitching rubber with a certain swagger, an approach born of confidence and genuine belief in his abilities.
The starting pitcher for the New York Mets wasn’t just someone who would attempt to throw a baseball past St. Louis Cardinals batters — he was a weapon for his manager Carlos “Mendy” Mendoza to aim squarely at the opposition.
The scheduled game time for the baseball game between the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, was 12:15 PM Central Daylight Time. It was a time for anticipation as much as it was a time for reflection. The sun was meant to appear in the sky over the ballpark.
The sun wasn’t intended to just shine — it was invited to beam.
The weather that greeted the scheduled game time for the baseball game between the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, contained clouds and rain. Baseball is a game played in many conditions, with clouds and rain sometimes a part of them.
The clouds and rain that appeared over Busch Stadium weren’t just an indicator of climate activity — they were an impediment to a prompt first pitch.
The rain delay that occurred at what was supposed to be the beginning of the scheduled baseball game between the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 1, 2026, would not dampen the enthusiasm of those who gathered from near and far to witness it. The waiting and the wetness combined to create more intrigue within what was already a heated rivalry that seemed to foreshadow a close encounter of the athletic kind.
The rain delay wasn’t just a rain delay — it was a delay wrought by rain. The baseball fans who endured it could only hope to be distracted in the interim period spanning the delay and the game by a smattering of utter foolishness.
The utter foolishness was a human construct — it would not compute on any date that wasn’t April 1.
by Jason Fry on 1 April 2026 6:27 am It happens every spring: A Mets loss arrives and then departs eliciting no reaction beyond a vaguely affronted shrug. A loss — striking in a new season where you still remember every twist of every game, but soon to fade into anonymity, becoming part of the blur of series and road trips and homestands and the season’s ebb and flow.
Happens every summer and fall too, come to think of it.
Kodai Senga looked good against the Cardinals, and if you want to be positive (always recommended), put that summation in your pocket and be done with Tuesday evening. The ghost fork wasn’t always as spectral as one would have wished, but the fastball sizzled and Senga had nothing but good things to say about his mechanics, in-game tactics and other factors that have sometimes come as affronts to his mildly prickly perfectionism. It’s easy to forget what a presence Senga was not so very long ago; Tuesday was a good sign he could be one again.
The Mets’ defense faltered at what turned out to be a key moment, though it wasn’t because Jorge Polanco or Bo Bichette or Brett Baty had been asked to play out of position; rather, the missteps came from Luis Robert Jr., normally reliable in center field.
Those missteps helped put the Mets in a 2-0 hole, one that got half again as deep when Richard Lovelady gave up a home run. Poor Lovelady: It’s no secret that his roster spot will go to A.J. Minter once that more accomplished lefty is ready, and it sure looks like the Mets will find some other warm body before then, once they conclude Lovelady has been battered and bruised beyond even what current negligence will allow.
(Cue Lovelady turning to a postgame interlocutor who’s gently asked about the possibility of finding another line of work: “What, and give up showbiz?”)
A couple of defensive lapses, a late bit of non-relief: None of it might have mattered if the Mets had done anything at all with the bats. Instead they offered us a trio of hits, a quartet of walks and exactly one runner making the acquaintance of third base.
That’ll happen too. Every spring, even. Though one devoutly hopes it doesn’t happen very often.
by Jason Fry on 31 March 2026 12:10 am Bo Bichette knows baseball pretty well, having played a lot of it — and seeing a bunch more before he did that professionally, what with being the child of a fairly renowned big leaguer. So he knows perfectly well that baseball is unpredictable, maddening and shot through with ironies big and small.
Like my blog partner, I was bothered by the Mets’ muffed finale against the Pirates more than seemed reasonable given a series win, the inevitability of losses, the season being a marathon and not a sprint, and all the other perfectly obvious reasons not to get irked about a frustrating though relatively humdrum loss. But Bichette’s candor after the game was refreshing — down to the “too” with which he adorned “I think my at-bats have been terrible too.” And that was even more refreshing when contrasted with Carlos Mendoza‘s omerta about Tim Leiper’s bad send.
(No need to make a federal case out of that last part. Mendy knows it was a bad send and so — one hopes — does Leiper. I’m sure there was a conversation to that effect on the flight to St. Louis or at some other away-from-the-cameras moment. At least for now, let’s move on.)
Baseball being baseball, there was Bichette in the middle of everything against the Cardinals as the Mets began a road trip on which they’ll start accumulating a startling number of frequent flyer miles. (Seriously, every time we blink in 2026 it will be to find the Mets oddly far out west.)
There Bichette was in the first, trying to bring in Francisco Lindor from third after Juan Soto couldn’t do so. He smacked a grounder to hotshot rookie JJ Wetherholt at second and Lindor went on contact — which made me think “oh God not again” until Wetherholt couldn’t get the ball out of his glove and the run scored. Bichette grounded into a double play in the third, but in the fifth he came up with the game knotted at one-all, Carson Benge on third and two out.
The Cards’ Kyle Leahy (pretty good until the tank hit E) left a fastball middle-middle and Bichette whacked it into the outfield for what may have been the most awkward RBI-producing single I’ve ever seen: His follow-through spun him like a top and he wound up sitting on home plate looking a little startled — though fortunately with plenty of time to collect himself and get to first. His next AB was a line shot to the outfield, which Jordan Walker converted into an out but was still much more what we wanted to see.
That’s baseball, isn’t it? You finally get that hit that’s proved so elusive and even then you wind up on your fanny, ready to announce to the world, “You’re probably wondering how I got here.”
Bichette’s mini-saga was the center of a pretty satisfying little game, one refreshingly free of angst and needless drama. Clay Holmes — the only starter who didn’t spit the bit in last year’s disaster — looked solid in his first outing of the year, backed up by near-spotless relief from Tobias Myers, Brooks Raley and Devin Williams. Raley was particularly fun to watch — he has the impassive mien every setup man acquires eventually, going about his business like a grizzled gunfighter who’s walked the deserted street of too many lawless towns, and whose only goal is “not today.”
If I can be petty, it was also satisfying to watch the Mets right their ship against the Cardinals. St. Louis wouldn’t make my list of 100 or even 200 favorite towns: The “best fans in baseball” shtick is self-satisfied and grating, new Busch is surrounded by generic light-beer malls, and the town is a dull place one escapes from rather than aspires to. Nothing sums St. Louis up better than being inside the Gateway Arch: The interior looks like a basement rec room in the suburbs, and when you peer out of it you realize there’s exactly one thing worth seeing in St. Louis and you’re in the one place where you can’t see it. (The only thing I have to recommend in St. Louis is the boozy shake at Baileys’ Range, but even they’ve shuttered their downtown location.)
The Cardinals are bad right now, probably headed for consecutive losing seasons for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. That’s a standard of excellence that even this committed Cardinals despiser has to respect — and it comes with the uneasy feeling that the Cardinals will be tormenting us again before we know it, re-engineered by Chaim Bloom to be a killing machine as per usual. All too soon their fans will be looking smug, SNY will be serving up fawning shots of that useless stupid arch, and the bile will rise in my throat as it has year-in and year-out since I was a kid.
We’ll be back on our butts in St. Louis all too soon, but this time with nary an RBI to show for it. Until then, well, here’s a boozy shake raised in salute to the idea that things change and annoyance can’t last forever.
by Greg Prince on 30 March 2026 2:11 pm When watching television, I sit on the audience-left side of our living room sectional, which means it’s my right arm that flexes out at the end of a particularly frustrating Mets loss, and the side of my right fist that instinctively punches the nearest cushion. Disgust thus manifested, I can move along to my cooling-off period before getting over one lousy ballgame in a lifetime littered by them. Yet Sunday, when the Mets came up one bleeping run short of the Pirates, 4-3, in ten innings, the cushion punch wasn’t enough. Thus, without thinking about it, I stood up, took a couple of steps, and kicked at air. My podiatrist would be glad to know no damage was incurred by my stockinged right foot. The doctor preaches prevention, and I learned long ago from Pat Zachry never to get mad near steps constructed from cement.
I punched. I kicked. I cursed. I muttered. But the irritation associated with this particular loss wouldn’t simmer down. I knew it was Just One Game. I knew it was only the season’s first loss, which I understood was going to show up eventually. Usually, I almost welcome a year’s inaugural defeat (when it’s not on Opening Day), because it represents a quiet victory for withstanding adversity. There’s no getting the game out of the ‘L’ column, but tomorrow comes, we’re still here, let’s go get ’em.
Here it is, tomorrow, and I’m still as annoyed by this loss as I was when it ended. I try not to toss the word “annoyed” around too much because if I let it fly too freely, I will never reel it in. Yet, wow, what an annoying game, and what an annoying end to such an annoying game.
Self-preservation suggests treading lightly over the most damning of details, so I’ll confine myself to the tying run that didn’t score in the tenth, the one Francisco Lindor carried to within inches of home plate from first base on Juan Soto’s double to deep left with nobody out and the Mets down by two. It was clearly enough to score unearned runner Francisco Alvarez from second, which was good, because Alvarez had to chug to make it the required 180 feet. But he did. Lindor I expected to be shadowing Alvarez, because Lindor can be as slick on the basepaths as Alvarez can be sludgy. The faster of our Franciscos whisked to third on a non-obvious triple earlier. I expected Lindor to be sent and I expected Lindor to score.
He was, but he didn’t. The Pirates made the plays they had to make, and even with an offline throw, they nailed Lindor at the plate. One out. Tying the game would have to wait. Soto, who’d landed on second, boldly took third on Bo Bichette’s ensuing grounder to short. Two out. Tying the game would have to continue to wait. Jorge Polanco then unleashed a blast to deep right, but not deep enough. It was caught in front of the wall. Three out.
No tie. No win. A lot of being annoyed, with the punching and the kicking and the cursing and the muttering indicating the level of annoyance. I would have liked to have seen an isolated replay of Lindor taking off from first, but the revamped SNY truck didn’t fire one up, so I don’t know if my confidence in the trail runner and new third base coach Tim Leiper was misplaced. I felt OK enough about the new three-hole hitter and his reputation for clutchitude perhaps picking up for whatever didn’t go right on Soto’s double, but that guy is having his own adjustment issues. Fans in Flushing were booing Bo once his nascent season line descended to 1-for-14 in the tenth. The third baseman acknowledged the reaction and empathized. “If anything,” he said of the impatient reception, “I thought it took too long.”
The new cleanup hitter, Polanco, did what he could do to effect a Luis Robert, Jr.-style ending from the day before, but it was the next day, and good ol’ baseball is the box of chocolates chock full of daily mysteries. Prevail in extras on a big swing from one of your fancy imports on Saturday, fall short in extras when the big swing from one of your fancy imports dies a little shy of glory on Sunday. You couldn’t blame Polanco. You could get miffed at Bichette if you wanted. You could dissect the decision to send Lindor. You could take apart bullpen tactics, too. It was one loss, which a person can mostly accept, certainly in March.
So why the hell was I so mad? Maybe the one-run nature of it was a bit much so soon for me. In August and September of last year, the Mets lost twelve one-run games, six of them at home. Every one of those Citi sags ended, to some extent, the way Sunday’s did. Just one more hit here. Just get the runner home. Just get a rally started. Just do something to avoid losing this very winnable game. But it never happened and 2025 couldn’t have wound down as any more frustrating or any more annoying. It’s 2026, and two exhilarating wins have been followed by a one-run loss that’s had me using the a-word for going on 24 hours.
It’s never really the couch cushion’s fault.
by Jason Fry on 28 March 2026 11:33 pm Opening Day brought balmy temperatures, runs a-plenty and good vibes. Most of Game 2, which arrived separated from Game 1 by the usual “rainouts happen” off-day, was the opposite: It was freezing, big hits were conspicuous in their absence, and the vibes were meh with a side of muttery.
David Peterson was very David Peterson: mostly good except when he lost the strike zone, as he tends to do, but he wiggled free of harm and departed in the sixth with no harm having been suffered. But Mitch Keller — the same Mitch Keller whose breakout has kept not quite arriving for the Pirates, like the bedroom door in Poltergeist — was just as good quantitatively and a little better qualitatively, not that the latter counts.
The Mets were no doubt glad to see Keller depart, but couldn’t break through against Justin Lawrence, last seen getting ambushed by Carson Benge and Francisco Alvarez on Opening Day. Nor could they do anything against Gregory Soto, who as a Met specialized in letting inherited runners score and not paying attention to baserunners and of course is now far more effective while getting paid by someone else. (Seriously, I fucking hate Gregory Soto.) And while we’re being muttery, so far every play Jorge Polanco is involved in at first base is improv. Polanco will get better, but until he does I’d buckle up.
The game was scoreless after nine, meaning it was time for another delightful round of Calvinball Presented by Rob Manfred. Luis Garcia (ha there are three of them so Baseball Reference can’t figure out how to do the link) allowed a Pirate run in the 10th, but we’re getting used to the idea that that’s barely a failure in Calvinball, let alone a fatality. The Mets immediately tied the game and had the bases loaded and nobody out against young Hunter Barco, which was when things took a left-hand swerve into bonkers territory.
Francisco Lindor hit a bouncer to second, a near-carbon copy of the play in which Isiah Kiner-Falefa and the Blue Jays failed to win the World Series. Brandon Lowe threw home as Marcus Semien slid home, but Henry Davis managed to keep a toe on the bag and the Mets’ first shot at a win had gone by the boards.
Up came Juan Soto, who hit a little excuse-me swinging bunt that Barco had to scramble off the mound to field. A lot can go wrong on a play like that — ask poor Orion Kerkering — but Barco made a nifty bare-handed grab and a perfect shovel toss to Davis to force Jared Young at home. Oh for two, and when Bo Bichette flied out the chance was gone.
Enter the peripatetic Richard Lovelady, who got two quick outs and looked like he was going to pull off a Calvinball near-miracle and keep the Manfred Man from scoring. (Do we have a name for this feat yet?) But with former Mets farmhand Jake Mangum on third, luck stopped being a lady, a development I doubt Richard greeted with much love. Bryan Reynolds sent a Lovelady sweeper ambling up the third-base line, a ball clearly destined to spin foul up until the moment that it didn’t and instead became a Mazeika Special that gave the Pirates the lead again. A lead they arguably should have padded when Marcell Ozuna lined a ball inside the right-field line, except Young played it well and the Pirates held Reynolds up at third rather than force the Mets to execute a perfect play.
(It’s just two games, but the Pirates look more than a little off-kilter: defensive lapses, strange bullpen and baserunning decisions, and players who don’t seem quite prepared for their duties, whether those include wearing sunglasses beneath a high sky or making sure the pitcher can get all his warm-up throws in.)
Anyway it was 2-1 Pirates, Barco was back out there for the 11th, and it was time for the Mets to climb that hill again in front of a chilly crowd that was fervently urging on a happy ending, if only to stay warm. Barco walked Polanco and started Luis Robert Jr. off with a bait changeup, which Robert ignored. Robert spent a good chunk of the spring on the back fields in Port St. Lucie, trying to rewire his batting eye to seek deeper counts — an laudable goal that’s awfully hard for hitters to make a reality, though the early returns from the first two games have been promising.
Barco’s second pitch was a slider at the bottom of the zone — another one to spit on, probably, but Robert found it to his liking. He connected and drove the ball toward left-center. A hit? Certainly. Up the gap? Quite possibly. Over the fence for a walkoff three-run homer? Indeed it was. Which maybe felt like the hard way, after the grinding frustration of the early innings and the surrealism of the late frames, but certainly got us to the outcome we wanted.
by Greg Prince on 27 March 2026 1:00 pm Did I hear him correctly? Did I hear Carson Benge, in the wake of his smashing major league debut at Citi Field, tell a friendly interlocutor that ”I want to keep playing here forever”? Don’t toy with us, kid. Because if you’re serious, we’re in the smitten state of mind to take you up on it.
Almost nobody who has indicated he was planning to play here forever plays here forever. It’s certainly not right to hold the freshest-faced of youngsters to such a sentiment. After all, there has been only one Wright in our lives. Proof of the transitory nature of unexpiring attachment to our environs and what they promise as permanent on a sunny, warm, and resoundingly successful Opening Day could be found in the box scores and bullpens of teams decidedly not rooted in Flushing. Did ya see who led off for Texas in Philadelphia? Who batted third for the Orioles at Camden Yards? Who didn’t need to get loose as the Dodgers pulled away from the Diamondbacks? Alas, as we learned anew amid the scalding flame of the Hot Stove, readjusting the parameters of “forever” is intrinsic to the business of baseball, and business was likely the last thing the 23-year-old right fielder of the New York Mets was thinking about in the minutes after he’d completed his very first game in front of an appreciative throng he could right then and there picture hitting home runs in front of for eternity.
Why wouldn’t Carson want to spend his career with us? He homered for us and was reciprocated a curtain call. He did a little of everything and was applauded heartily. He had Metsopotamia leaning forward with him, anticipating more homers, more walks, more steals, more hustle, more talent, more confidence, more of everything that marked our first taste of him and his of us. The fact that forever is a mighty long time escapes an interested party on Opening Day.
Let’s go crazy. Let’s funnel an Opening Day like Thursday’s into a nearby 3-D printer and crank out 161 copies. The weather sent winter to an undisclosed location. The lineup, with one Met entering our consciousness after another, was bountiful in its production. Eleven runs. Eleven hits. Ten bases on balls. A harmless hit by pitch. Nearly 200 pitches elicited from the hapless hurlers representing Pittsburgh. The Mets could leave double-digit runners on and we didn’t have to stress. The visiting Pirates could place one of the sport’s elite pitchers to the hill and we didn’t have to withstand his appearance for as long an inning. Granted, it was a long two-thirds of an inning. Paul Skenes, the Cy Young winner who was probably the reason NBC wanted this game to reactivate its association with baseball, threw 37 pitches to nine Mets. He recorded two outs. The Mets made him work, then made him go away. His center fielder, a converted shortstop of notable height, didn’t help his cause, but our guys — they are all our guys now — put patience in their approach, bats to balls, and Skenes in the dugout.
Erstwhile outlanders Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, Luis Robert, Jr., and Marcus Semien meshed marvelously with the holdovers Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, Brett Baty, and powerhouse catcher Francisco Alvarez. Benge was the cherry on top of this beautifully blended sundae, evidenced most tantalizingly by his sixth-inning liner over the right-center field fence. If you’re serious about sticking around, Carson, you’re 263 off the franchise career record. But maybe we’ll savor your potential one swing at a time.
The new ace pitcher, Freddy Peralta, hung in for five innings. He was nicked here and there, but he was supported handsomely (including by ABS), so therefore we’ll call his first start splendid. Tobias Myers, the next ex-Brewer up, was leaned on for three frames, and he quashed any notion that the slugfest in progress might get a little too mutually sluggy. Luis Garcia finished up looking more like the kind of veteran Met reliever we’re used to picking up on the open market, giving up a pair of shaky runs out of the gate, but that’s what six-run ninth-inning leads for. The 11-7 final functioned as a satisfying down payment on the days and months ahead.. Results such as this one can’t be easily replicated, but if we could, we’d invite them to keep playing forever.
They probably won’t, but after an Opening Day like 2026’s, you can dream that we will forever pass this way again.
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