It wasn’t a statement win, to be sure. It wasn’t a win that said the 12-game losing streak had been some weird, early-season fluke.
But on this night, any win was going to feel practically life-changing for the Mets, lifting the weight of the world off their shoulders.
“It’s a sigh of relief,” was the way Luke Weaver put it, after getting the last four outs of the 3-2 win over the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday night at Citi Field.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to go on and win 50 straight games, but it allows us to just go out and play and not worry about trying to end the streak. It was going to take a win like this to get us going.”
By that, he meant a nail-biter, a game that saw the Mets lose leads of 1-0 and 2-1, as everyone in the ballpark seemed to brace for another cruel ending. All the more so when Mark Vientos, one of the slowest runners in baseball, purposefully ran through a stop sign trying to force the action with the game tied 2-2, only to be thrown out by 10 feet.
Yep, they were going to lose again. Why would this night be any different? The Mets hadn’t won since April 7, for crying out loud.
So when they didn’t lose, when they finally did find a way to win, with Weaver getting a huge out in the eighth with the bases loaded and then closing out the ninth, and Vientos redeeming himself with a bloop go-ahead single, you could feel a certain lightness in the clubhouse.
Not celebratory to be sure. But the relief was palpable. Players were quick to smile and exchange a bit of humor.
“I warmed them up for you,” Weaver said with a laugh to Clay Holmes, speaking of the media group waiting for the starting pitcher.
Yet it was all very self-contained, perhaps because the Mets really do believe they are much better than all of this, scratching and clawing to score runs and find a way to win just one ballgame.
Or perhaps too because it was impossible to ignore the reality that they likely lost Francisco Lindor for a significant length of time with a calf injury on the same night that Juan Soto returned from a three-week absence with the same injury.
If that represents symmetry for the 2026 Mets, this season might just be as doomed as it felt while the 12-game losing streak dragged on into historic territory.
In any case, this new reality seemed to weigh especially heavily on Carlos Mendoza. It’s clear he fears Lindor could be out at least as long as Soto, and perhaps longer, depending on what an MRI on Thursday reveals.
“We got relatively good news with Soto and it was still three weeks,” Mendoza said after the game. “It’s what we’re dealing with right now. We lost Soto and we had a hard time. We’re going to have to find a way.”
Mendoza said he knew it was bad as soon as he saw Lindor slow up going around third, as he scored from first on Francisco Alvarez’s double to right-center, injuring the calf along the way.
“Then I could see the look on his face, walking to the dugout,” Mendoza said. “Then he had to come out of the game.”
Lindor, of course, rather famously wants to play every day through anything, whether it’s a broken toe, a broken finger, or the birth of a child, none of which has kept him from his shortstop position.
The worst news for the Mets, of course, is that Lindor was finally starting to heat up at the plate after one of his notoriously cold starts to a season.
He had the three-run home run on Tuesday, two hits on Wednesday, and nine hits in his last seven games.
Even more to the point, there’s no getting around the fact that as Lindor goes, so go the Mets. It has been that way year after year: they win when he hits, they lose when he doesn’t.
He’s always had that impact, going back to his days in Cleveland. For his career, spanning 10 seasons for the Guardians and Mets, Lindor has put up a .950 OPS in games his team has won, as opposed to .638 in losses. In wins, he’s hit .316, in losses, .216.
Those numbers have been even more dramatic with the Mets. Last season, he had a .999 OPS in games the Mets won, compared to .610 in losses. In wins, he hit .333, in losses, .196.
And in 2024, the season in which Lindor carried the Mets to the postseason, making a run at the MVP Award, his OPS in wins was 1.084, compared to .543 in losses.
Mendoza knows all of that. He knows that even with Soto back, the Mets are going to feel the loss of Lindor at a time when they need to make a run to have any hope of getting back into contention in the coming weeks and months.
As it was, he could only smile wryly when asked after the game if he expected to come back with the same new-look lineup he used on Wednesday, with Bo Bichette leading off the Lindor in the clean-up spot.
“Well, we probably won’t have Lindor,” he said. “So I’m probably going to have to get creative.”
It’s been that kind of season for the Mets. The losing streak was over. And yet you knew the manager wasn’t going to sleep well. Again.
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