Turnabout Is Fair Play

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.