David Lennon: Mets own the Bronx for at least one day
Mets designated hitter Juan Soto watches the flight of his solo home run against the Yankees during the seventh inning at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Never mind the Subway Series.
For the Mets, this weekend is their World Series, or the closest thing they’ll see to a big stage before the curtain comes down Sept. 27 in Washington.
And on Saturday afternoon, the Mets owned every inch of the Bronx, from home plate to Monument Park, putting together a 12-2 rout of the Yankees that featured six home runs, superb defense and a brilliant seven-inning performance by rookie lefty Zac Thornton.
We know conventional wisdom says to throw out what we’re witnessing at this time of year from a team going nowhere. But these Mets are a bit of an outlier. They have gone 22-13 since the Aug. 3 trade deadline while battling through a schedule stocked with teams fighting for their playoff lives.
The Yankees are the latest of those October-bound foes, and as far as the pressure being off, that doesn’t really apply to the Subway Series, which was played Saturday in front of the usual sellout crowd (46,864). By the time Francisco Lindor crushed an eighth-inning grand slam, a nice bookend to his game-opening homer off Gerrit Cole, the “Let’s Go Mets!” chants were cranking up as the demoralized Yankee fans sprinted for the exits.
For the Mets, it doesn’t get any sweeter during the regular season. But there were plenty of other highlights to make them forget — at least for an afternoon — about being hopelessly out of contention and the ruinous, injury-riddled path that led them here.
“It’s been an uphill fight this whole year,” Lindor said. “It just sucks that we haven’t played as much together. But when we do play together and we are all in the lineup, things like this can happen. This is what we should have been doing since the beginning. But it’s part of the journey, it’s part of the year. Try to make the most out of it.”
Lindor and Juan Soto swapped extended stints on the injured list because of severe calf strains and barely shared the same lineup when it mattered. Now that the Mets’ two franchise players are functioning simultaneously, the lineup is far more dangerous — and fun to watch.
Take Soto, who bounced back from Friday’s miserable game-ending double play to silence the jeers with a pair of hits, including a 400-foot blast in the seventh inning. It’s been a frustrating season for the Mets’ $765 million slugger, and he got his usual high-decibel harassment at the Stadium, but you could tell he savored this 106.7-mph rainbow into the rightfield seats by taking a few seconds to admire the flight.
“Regardless, it’s always great to have a good day,” Soto said. “For me, it’s the same everywhere. We just try to lock in and stay focused on the game.”
It’s understandable that Soto doesn’t want to get into any verbal battles with the Bronx mobs, but Yankee Stadium will never be the same as other MLB outposts. The former Yankee will be relentlessly booed there until he retires, which is why Saturday’s flex had to be extra-satisfying. And plenty of his teammates joined the party.
Carson Benge's standout performance Saturday was just the continuation of a personal joyride that has him in contention for National League Rookie of the Year honors. Benge drilled his 17th homer in the third inning and added an RBI single in the fifth, giving him 147 hits and pretty much guaranteeing that he’ll pass Pete Alonso (155 in 2019) for the most by a Mets rookie in a season.
And we couldn’t bring up Benge without mentioning another spectacular defensive play, as he robbed Aaron Judge of extra bases with his fully horizontal dive in the eighth.
Afterward, Soto dropped a “superstar” on Benge when asked about his rookie teammate. For Benge, however, it’s become just another day at the office.
“It’s pretty cool,” Benge said of Soto’s praise. “It’s pretty special to be able to catch someone’s eye like that. So I’ll just keep doing my thing and working hard every day.”
Said interim manager Andy Green: “It’s fun watching guys play the game all out and leave it all out there all the time. The diving catches are turning into something that you now expect, which tells you something about the type of defender he is. When he goes in the gap and you see him running, he’s going to lay out and catch this. He just does it again and again and again.”
Green added that a few Mets had even stopped giving Benge high-fives because his Superman-style grabs are almost routine at this point. Still, the Mets spent just about all of Saturday celebrating at the Yankees’ expense, first kicking out Cole after 4 1/3 innings and then admiring Thornton’s mastery of a lineup that featured three former MVPs yet dented him for only two runs, both supplied by Cody Bellinger with a home run and RBI single.
Thornton’s signature moment came in the seventh, when the Yankees, trailing 6-2, put two on with one out and Anthony Volpe coming to the plate. Green visited for a chat and chose to stick with Thornton, who told him he’d get a double play. Two pitches later, Volpe bounced into a 5-4-3 DP and a screaming Thornton pumped his fist en route to the dugout.
“I love pitching in front of New York fans,” Thornton said.
It was all Mets in the middle game of this Subway Series on a Saturday afternoon that could make them dream of bigger things in the future. Sunday’s duel with American League Cy Young favorite Cam Schlittler will present another chance to prove themselves worthy.
“Understand we didn’t meet expectations for the vast majority of the season,” Green said. “But where this group is mentally right now, when we step on the field, we expect to win. We don’t really care who’s on the other side.”
They’ve put the Yankees on notice, that’s for sure.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
