Laura Albanese: Mets' mettle may be key to turning season around
The Mets Carson Benge celebrates after reaching on a fielder's choice and scoring Marcus Semien to defeat the Yankees in the 10th inning at Citi Field on Sunday. Credit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara
WASHINGTON — The star-studded Mets were scrambling for answers in the waning weeks of the 2025 season. Carlos Mendoza sometimes looked frustrated, Francisco Lindor puzzled and Juan Soto grimly determined, all while saying some variation of the same thing: This roster is too talented to fail.
In a way, those Mets were the World Series champions of unmet potential — proof that even in a sport as data-driven as baseball, cold, hard talent can carry you only so far.
This iteration of the Mets has a dissimilar problem. But if this past weekend, along with Monday’s 16-7, 12-inning win over the Nationals is any indication, that might not be too much of a problem at all.
Because against some pretty tall odds, this team is showing real moxie.
Oh, sure, the roster looked plenty talented in spring training — for $365 million, it better have — but then human frailty took over, thanks to a litany of injuries and players who haven’t always filled their roles in ways David Stearns may have hoped.
That alone means that the Mets are in a tight spot. After Christian Scott’s four-inning outing Monday, the bullpen will continue to be taxed. Clay Holmes’ broken leg, meanwhile, means the team intends to call up lefty Zach Thornton to pitch Wednesday despite only 12 innings with the Syracuse Mets.
There’s a valid (and telling) reason the Mets went with Thornton. See, he doesn’t blow you away. He showcases “pitchability” — i.e. pitching IQ — induces ground balls and throws five average pitches with above-average control.
But it’s “the demeanor” that earned him this chance, Mendoza said before Monday’s game.
Mental makeup is a real thing. When the bullpen squandered the lead against the Nationals by allowing two runs in the seventh and eighth — the latter of which tied it at 5 — they could’ve rolled over. When the Nationals tied it again in the 11th, they could have looked at their weary arms and felt, as it often seemed during that dire first month, that winning was out of reach.
Instead, they scored 10 runs in the 12th, keyed by smart, gritty at-bats and heads-up defensive plays by Brett Baty, who added three RBIs, along with a gutsy two-inning performance from Huascar Brazoban in extra innings. They became the first National League team to score at least 10 runs in extra innings since the 1919 Reds, according to The Associated Press.
“The resilience, the grit,” Mendoza said. “It’s a new series, a new day. What happened yesterday doesn’t matter . . . We kept punching.”
It’s part of a trend, and you’ve seen evidence of that mettle in young guys such as Carson Benge and A.J. Ewing and in established if perhaps under-the-radar players in Tyrone Taylor and Luke Weaver. Even Soto, for all his strengths, has a steeliness to him — a trait that has helped him emerge as a more vocal leader.
Actually, Soto said something a little funny after Saturday’s win over the Yankees — a game in which the spindly Weaver stared down a behemoth Aaron Judge to cap a game-saving, two-inning relief performance — on a day when the Mets were openly reeling from the news of Holmes’ broken leg.
“That’s unicorn stuff.”
That’s an interesting way to put it, isn’t it?
Unicorns aren’t particularly fearsome creatures, but they’re mythical and, in the context of Soto’s comparison, special. When you look at Weaver, or at Ewing and Benge, you’re looking at players thriving by defying expectation.
And despite being last in the NL East, the Mets have made a habit of that sort of thing.
Before Sunday’s win, they had lost 96 straight games (including the postseason) in which they were trailing after the eighth inning. Instead, they won a series against a crosstown rival that had ample opportunity to sweep them. They came back in each of their five wins on the homestand.
Of course, it’s hardly just about the intangibles. The Mets do have weapons, but after that crummy April, the current team doesn’t look as stacked as the one that took the field last year.
But remember, those Mets were “too talented” to be that bad . . . except they were that bad. Conversely, there’s a chance here for these Mets to flip the script: forget the injuries, forget they’re supposed to fail.
“I think we’re just feeding off each other,” Baty said. “[We were] just battling all night.”
If they do that, they may have a prayer — because while baseball is many things, it is, above all else, weird, unexpected and sure, a little bit of a unicorn.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
