The Mets won the World Series

The Mets won the World Series.

Not the real one. Relax.

But after taking two out of three from the Yankees at Citi Field, Mets fans finally got the kind of Subway Series weekend they were starving for. Friday looked like more of the same after Cam Schlittler shoved and Clay Holmes went down with a fractured fibula. Then Saturday changed the tone when Luke Weaver escaped a bases-loaded, nobody-out jam against his former team. By Sunday, Tyrone Taylor was sending Citi Field into chaos with a game-tying three-run homer, and Carson Benge was walking it off in extra innings.

This episode kicks off the new shorter format: one main story, one real conversation, and a tighter sports-radio feel.

The Mets didn’t fix their whole season. The Yankees aren’t suddenly broken. But rivalry weekends are supposed to feel like something, and this one did.

Follow the show on Instagram: @RiceontheRadio

Transcript

Cold Open And The New Rhythm

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I guess this is the only one way to find out. Let's do it. Let's do it. Do it tonight. Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the show. We're trying something a little different here. And I think this is going to be good for the show going forward. Shorter episodes, tighter topics, more throughout the week. So instead of me trying to cram the entire sports world into one hour, hour fifteen, hour twenty, whatever madness I usually end up getting into, we're going to start breaking things up a little bit here. One main story, one spot, one conversation. So today, we're starting with the Mets Yankees Subway Series weekend at City Field. The Mets took two out of three from the Yankees. Citifield got loud, Yankees fans got annoyed. Mets fans got a little life back in their old body. And apparently, from what I've been told my entire life, that means that the Mets won the World Series. So fine. Let's call it that. The Mets won the World Series. Now, obviously, relax. Nobody's hanging a banner. Nobody's calling up the Canada Heroes. Nobody's putting Tyrone Taylor next to Seaver, Piazza, Wright, and Lindor because he hit one ball around the foul pole in May. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every time the Mets beat the Yankees, especially if the Mets are having a lesser season, especially if the Yankees are the better team on paper. Especially if the Mets fans are a little too happy for everyone's liking. Here comes the same old line. Oh, this is their World Series. Yankees fans love that line. They love it. It's like a warm, cozy blanket on a cold night. It's like an emotional bubble rap. The Mets beat the Yankees and immediately, yeah, well, of course they care. This is their World Series. Okay. What do you want them to do? Not care? That's the whole point of the in town rivalry. Yankees don't get to spend decades telling everybody that they're the big brother. They're the standard. They're the franchise with the rings and the team that everybody measures themselves against, and then get mad when the Mets beat them and the Mets fans enjoy it. That's not how this works, guys. If the Yankees win, it counts. But if the Mets win, apparently it's embarrassing that the Mets fans had fun. That is a beautiful little scam Yankee fans have built for themselves. Win the game, and it's proof that the Yankees are still the Yankees. Lose the game and it's proof that the Mets they care too much. Of course. Who cares? Elite level damage control. Look, I respect the hustle, but I ain't buying it. The Mets did not win the World Series this weekend, no kidding. But they did win a rivalry weekend they badly needed. For a team that's been beaten up, injured, inconsistent, frustrating, and sometimes just flat out depressing. This was the kind of weekend where the fan base finally got to breathe for a second. Not playing a parade, not declare the season saved, just breathe. I mean, City Field felt alive for the first time in a while. The dugout looked alive. The kids brought some juice. You had ex-Yankeys in the bullpen. They got their little revenge moment. Met fans got to enjoy baseball without immediately having to apologize for it. That's all this had to be. Not a championship, but show some pulse. You know, the funny part is this weekend didn't even start with the Mets fans celebrating. It started with the Yankees punching them in the face, punching them right in the mouth. Friday night was not a fun rivalry baseball for the Mets. Friday night was the version of the Mets season where they sit there and go, oh, so uh we're we're gonna be we're gonna be doing this again, huh? Clint Cam Schlittler, Cam Schlittler, there we go, comes into City Field, Subway Series debut, and he shoves on the hill, man. He's the real deal. Carries a one-hit shutout into the seven, strikes out nine. For most of the night, Mets' offense looked like it was just trying to hit a fastball with a folding chair. That's not a deep analytical breakdown either. That's just what it really felt like. Schlitler was throwing 96, 97, 98, 99. The Mets, the Mets have had issues with velocity, and Friday night was one of those games where you could feel it. Every at-bat felt uncomfortable. Nothing felt easy. The Yankees were the cleaner team, the sharper team, the more physical team, to be honest with you. Jazz has the big two-run double, Ben Rice adds a home relate. Yankees win 5'2. Pretty standard Yankee beats Mets type of a game. Then the Clay Holmes injury happens. And that changes the whole mood. That was brutal, man. Spencer Jones hits a comebacker 111 off the bat, right off Holmes, fractured fibula. Holmes stays in for a little bit, but then you find out after the game what it is. And it's not just, oh, the Mets lose game one. Now it becomes Mets lose game one and they lose one of their few steady starters that they had going. That's the part that really stings. Holmes wasn't just another guy in the rotation. He had become one of the few reliable pieces in a season where the Mets have been trying to locate solid ground with a flashlight and a prayer. This team is already missing Lindor, missing Alvarez. Polanco's dealing with an Achilles or something, whatever the hell it is. Luis Robert is out with spine surgery. Sangha has been terrible, and now he's out anyway. The injury list is starting to look like a full group chat. Now Holmes goes down. Friday night had that here we go again smell to it. You lose to the Yankees, you lose the opener, you lose Holmes. The offense doesn't do much. Soto hits a homer, fine. But outside of that, there wasn't a lot to grab onto. So for Mets fans, that's the kind of night where you're not even mad in a loud way. You're just sitting there like, yeah, of course, here we go. Why wouldn't this happen? More ammo for Yankee fans. That's why Saturday is the game I keep coming back to. Sunday had the movie scene, sure. Sunday had the crazy swing, the walk-off. Sunday had the part everybody's going to remember. But Saturday was the hinge in the door. Saturday was the game where the weekend could have gone two completely different ways. The Mets could have folded. Nobody would have been shocked either. After Friday, after Holmes, after the way the season is gone so far. If the Yankees came in Saturday and took the second game, that whole weekend gets filed under the same old Mets paying folder. Instead, well, instead, the Mets actually answered. And they end up winning 6-3. Vientos drives in three, Soto gets on base, Peterson gives him just enough, and the lineup does just enough. But the moment of that game is Luke Weaver. Base is loaded, nobody out, seventh inning, Yankees threatening. This is the exact inning where the Mets fans start hearing the horror movie music. They just turn the game off. They go, I know what's going on. You know the inning. Every fan base has that version of it. But the Mets fans know this one all too well. The drop ball happens from Benge. Junge scores. The Yankees are right there. Goldschmidt gets a hit. Jazz drops that little pop-up bunt into no man's land. Base is loaded. Nobody out. You can feel the game starting to tilt. It's 5'3, but it doesn't feel like 5'3 anymore. Feels like the Yankees are about to do the Yankee thing. It feels like the Mets are about to do the Met thing. And then here comes Big Dick Weaver. Mr. Big Moment Weaver. Comes in against his old team and shuts the whole thing down. Strikeout, strikeout, ground ball, get out of my bar. That's a real moment right there. And anything like that can wake up an entire dugout. A team that's been getting kicked around suddenly gets to say, wait a second, man. We don't have to collapse here. We're better than this. Weaver getting out of that spot against the Yankees against his former team with the bases loaded and nobody out. It's more than a nice bullpen appearance. It changes the whole room. Then Devin Williams, another former Yankee, comes in and closes it out with a clean ninth. You want to talk about rivalry spice. That's not just spice. That's that's that's a thousand on the skull fell field. That's 1,400, 1,500, 30,000 on the skull fell field. A player that Yankee fans couldn't wait to get off their bullpen closes them out. You know, former Yankees helping the Mets beat the Yankees is exactly the kind of annoying little detail that makes these games fun. All it's been is, oh, the Mets just keep signing Yankees players, former Yankees players. Yeah, well, how'd that work out, huh? And from the Yankee side, you know, the Saturday game should bother you. Not because the season's over, not because anybody needs to throw a chair through a window or anything, but bases loaded, nobody out. You have the Mets wobbling seven games under 500, and you get nothing. That's the inning. A team with World Series expectations is supposed to cash in. That's the inning. They're supposed to take the lead. The inning where you say, Derek, thanks for leaving the door open, man. We'll take it from here. Instead, well, the Yankees let the Mets survive. Baseball's weird, man. Baseball is weird because it's not every turning point looks huge in the box score. Sometimes the turning point is just one inning where a team escapes the thing that usually swallows them. And that was Saturday. Friday was the punch. Saturday was the response. Sunday. Sunday was the payoff. Sunday was ridiculous. This is why rivalries exist. This is why you sit through cold April losses and annoying bullpen decisions and dead offense and weird injuries and all this stuff that makes you question why you care so much about grown men in matching pants. The Yankees are up 6'3 going into the ninth. At that point, if you're a Mets fan, you're probably talking yourself into a moral victory. Hey, one out of three isn't great, but they showed some fight. They responded Saturday. Maybe they can carry something into the Washington series. Maybe this team found a little light. All the nonsense we tell ourselves when we're trying not to be miserable. David Bednar is on the mound. Yankee fans are one out of way. Mets are down three. It's over, man. It's over. And then the baseball gods do the thing where it picks the funniest possible person to become the main character. Not Soto, not Judge, not Bichette, not one of the billion-dollar stars. Tyrone Taylor, fourth outfielder, defense first guy, hitting 145 on the year. The kind of player who, if you told somebody before the series, hey, this weekend is going to turn on the Tyrone Taylor swing, they'd look at you like you'd been sitting in City Field parking lot inhaling fumes from cars. But hey, that's baseball, Susan. Bench singles, Bichette singles, Soto reaches on the force out. Viento strikes out, two outs. Now here comes Taylor. First pitch curveball from Bender. Hanging just enough. Guys hitting 145. Taylor barrels it up. Left field toward the pole. Everybody waits. Fairball. Tie game. City field goes insane. That's the whole weekend right there. Not perfect baseball. Not pretty baseball by any means. Alive baseball. The Mets didn't play perfect baseball this weekend. Let's not rewrite history here. They dropped balls. They made mistakes. Bench had to misplay Saturday. Bichette drops the pop-up Sunday. There were plenty of moments where you watch them and thought, how is this team trying to save its season and also trying to make me age seven years in one inning? But they kept playing. For they've been this season, Alive is a pretty good place to start. And then the 10th inning comes. And Carson Bench, a kid who struggled, kid who's been a mess, but has fought back. He's right in the middle of it. AJ Ewing gets the runner over. Terence gets hit. Yankees bring in the five-man infield. Everything is tight. Everybody's standing. Every ball and play feels like it's about to create chaos. Benji, it's a little chopper. A little Baltimore chop. Volte and Schumann both go for it. Collision. Simeon scores Mets win. That is such a subway series ending. Not a majestic walk-off homer into the Coca-Cola corner. Not some clean Hollywood thing. Not some baseball is romantic. A chopper. A collision. Confusion, chaos. The winning run slides in and everybody loses their mind. Perfect. That's almost better, honestly. The messiness makes it feel more mets. Benji's interesting, man, because he's not just some clean rookie fairy tale where everything is smooth. He makes mistakes. He's had he's had some errors in the field. There's going to be some ugly moments with young players. That's just what it is when they get to the big leagues. But yet, he keeps ending up in winning moments. And there's value in that. Young players bring oxygen to a team. They play with a different kind of energy. They don't always know where they're supposed to be miserable just yet. And that sounds funny, but it's true. Sometimes a team gets so deep into a bad season that the whole thing starts feeling heavy. Every at bad as baggage. Every mistake feels like a referendum. Every loss feels like it proves something terrible. Then here come the young guys. They come up and they just they play. They're humping in the outfield. They're making stupid jokes. They're smiling when they shouldn't be, or being serious when they should be happy. You know, Benge, Ewing, that speed, that energy, that chaos, it doesn't fix everything, but it sure changes the temperature in the clubhouse. And the Mets needed that more than anything. They needed someone to make the ballpark feel like less like a waiting room for one weekend. And they got it. Now, Yankee fans, Yankee fans are going to say it's May. And that's that's right. That's correct. Great point. Elite calendar work. It is May. Nobody said the Yankees season ended because they lost two out of three at City Field. The Yankees are still better positioned than the Mets. They have the better record. They still have Aaron Judge. Garrett Cole's getting closer. There's a lot of season left. They'll be fine. But you don't get to blow a three-run lead with one out left against the Mets and finish a two and seven road trip and then act like everybody else is weird for noticing. You know, that was a bad loss. That was a bad road trip. That was a bad way to end your weekend, especially with Tampa on your heels and now leading the division. Bednar giving up that home run is a real concern. Not a five alarm concern, but there is something there. That's the closer. That's the guy that you're handing the ninth inning to. You get up three, one out away, and Tyrone Taylor gets you. That's gonna annoy some people, man. And it should. Yankees have some stuff to figure out. Max Fried going on the IL with the elbow bone bruise. Rodon is trying to settle back in, but it hasn't looked great just yet. Cole might be coming back soon, which obviously changes the conversation. But, you know, is he gonna be in that same Cole spot coming off of Tommy John? I mean, he's a big enough talent, I'm sure he's going to be, but still gonna ask a lot from him early in his uh post-rehab stint with the team here. They're in that weird spot where the big picture team is still good while the current movement looks a little shaky. And again, both can be true. You know, the Yankees are a serious team. The Yankees also had a terrible weekend. From the Mets side, well, it's kind of the same deal. The Mets did not fix their entire season just because they beat the Yankees. They are still under 500, they are still banged up, they need Lindor back, even with all the drama. They need Alvarez back, they need Luis Roberts Jr. back, and they need Bichette to start looking like the guy that they thought they were getting. They gotta figure out what the life looks like without Holmes for a little bit here now, too. So this is not a finished product. This is not even close to a finished product, but it is a pulse. That's the word for me right now. A pulse. You don't go from buried to back overnight. First, you stop looking dead. Then you stack a few days, then you stack a few series, and you start to feel a little more important than the next one. Then you look up and maybe the season is a little more oxygen, and all of a sudden you're 500, and you're not selling at the deadline. Yeah, these are all pipe dreams, but that's all this weekend had to be for the Mets. It does not have to be some grand declaration, hey, we're back. The Mets are back, baby. No. It just has to be a start. They came into this stretch needing a reason to believe that the season wasn't already slipping away from them. They swept Detroit. They took two out of three from the Yankees, and then they go on to Washington and win another chaotic extra inning game with Bench right in the middle of it again. Now you're not talking about one cute weekend anymore. Now you're talking about a team trying to climb out of a hole. Still a hole, a deep hole, to be clear. But you know what? At least they're climbing. They're not digging with a shovel anymore. They started building a ladder. It's kind of where I landed on the whole Mets won the World Series thing. It's funny, it's annoying. It's the exact thing Yankees fans say when they don't want to admit that the Mets got under their skin. But the reason the joke works is that this weekend did feel bigger than a normal May series. Not because the standings say it was bigger, it just felt bigger because of where the Mets were emotionally. Holmes goes down Friday. Saturday could have turned into another meltdown and it didn't. And Sunday becomes one of those games that lets a Mets fan feel something besides dread for a couple hours. And honestly, it'll probably get replayed on the Mets uh amazing finishes on rain delays. Mets fans are allowed to enjoy that. Sports are supposed to be emotional. That's the entire point. We spend all this time pretending we're being rational. We cite stats, we talk payroll, we talk projections, we talk run differential, playoff odds, all this stuff has its place. And then Tyrone Taylor hitting 145 hits a three-run homer around the foul bowl on a hanging curve, and everybody turns into a lunatic. That's the good stuff. That's why we watch. So if you're a Mets fan, enjoy the weekend. Don't turn into something that it's not. Don't start acting like all the problems are solved. Don't start booking October flights. But enjoy it. Your team got punched first Friday. They answered on Saturday, and they stole the weekend Sunday. That's a good sports weekend. And if you're a Yankee fan, you're still fine. You don't have to panic. You don't have to pretend the team is bad. You don't have to throw the season away because of one bad road trip in May. But you do have to eat the loss. That's the deal. You can't spend the whole rivalry acting like the Yankees are royalty. And then when the Mets beat you, suddenly it's beneath you to care. Just take the L, man. Be annoyed, move on. That's sports. The Mets needed this weekend more. The Yankees are still better positioned. It's all good. So the Mets won the World Series. Not the real one. The annoying one. The one Yankee fans invented, so they don't have to admit the subway series still bothers them. So again, no, nobody's planning a parade. Nobody is hanging a banner. Nobody's pretending a May weekend fixed the entire season. But the Mets won a rivalry series they badly needed for, and for a couple days, City Field felt good. Sometimes that's all you need the weekend to be, man. Well, I appreciate you guys listening. Like I said at the top, this is the new rhythm we're working on. Shorter episodes, little tighter topics, more throughout the week. One story at a time instead of trying to jam every single thing into one giant episode. We'll keep building it. Baseball today, more coming this week. We'll keep rolling with whatever sports gods decide to throw at us, right? Follow along on the Instagram at Rice on the Radio. Send me your thoughts. Tell me I'm wrong, tell me I'm right. Tell me the Mets did, in fact, win the World Series. Be good to each other. Tell us when you love them. And as always, let's do it to it.