The New York Mets and New York Yankees entered the season with championship aspirations, backed by last year’s playoff runs and an offseason’s worth of acquisitions. The Mets signing of Juan Soto resembled the shifting power dynamics in the sport’s biggest market, but the Yankees’ response, including signing Cy Young contender Max Fried, helped keep both in first place for much of the early going.
In June, disaster struck. The Mets spiraled through divisional contests and a sweep from the Pittsburgh Pirates to fall out of first in the NL East. Before winning the final two games of a three-game set against the Milwaukee Brewers, they had lost 14 of 17.
A normal season would see Yankees fans use that as banter. Except they, too, have started the summer slow, entering the Subway Series at 6-14 in their last 20 games. With the two set to begin a three-game set on Friday, they can point to the same issue for their struggles.
The injury bug has hit New York City
Things were going too well for Mets fans to be comfortable. A starting staff made out of buy-low gambles had produced the league’s best ERA, and the bullpen was firing on all cylinders. They were finding success without Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas, staying healthy, and outperforming expectations.
Then the injuries struck.
Kodai Senga went down with a hamstring, and Tylor Megill was sidelined with elbow inflammation. Griffin Canning ruptured his Achilles, and Paul Blackburn suffered a shoulder impingement, quickly running them out of able-bodied pitchers. At the same time, the bullpen regressed, losing the strike zone and a handful of arms to injury, including Max Kranick, Dedniel Núñez, A.J. Minter, and Danny Young.
On Friday, multi-inning reliever José Buttó was added to that list. The team called up Chris Devenski in his place.
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Their cross-town rivals haven’t had better luck. What entered spring training as one of the American League’s most feared rotations lost Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil before the season started. Ryan Yabrough landed on the injured list on June 20, and on Thursday, Clarke Schmidt’s season was put on hold with forearm tightness, a potential precursor to a UCL catastrophe.
Both of these teams will enter the Subway Series in desperate need of better fortunes, but they’ll be searching for it against lineups poised to do damage against beleaguered pitching staffs.
What to expect in Flushing
As the rivalry hits its second stop of the season, there’s a real chance that bad baseball dominates the weekend.
Friday afternoon will showcase former Met Marcus Stroman and Justin Hagenman, a 28-year-old fringe-MLB arm with a 6.21 ERA in AAA this season. To his credit, he’s pitched well in his six Major League innings thus far. But that hasn’t come against the likes of Aaron Judge, whose “slump” has dropped his average down to .364.
The Mets can take solace in Stroman’s recent struggles. He pitched to a 4.31 ERA in 2024 and was rocked in his early-season starts before returning for five innings of one-run ball against the Athletics. Never one to strike out many batters, the opportunity for Soto to show the Yankees what they’re missing should present itself.
The Yankees have an undeniable advantage in the next two games, offering up Carlos Rodón and Fried against Montas and Brandon Waddell, a journeyman hoping to parlay KBO experience into MLB success.
The bottom of these bullpens are as vulnerable as ever, making damage control a deciding factor in this series. If either side gets blown up early and taxes its bullpen further, they risk throwing low-priority arms in high-leverage innings. Against these lineups, that spells disaster.
Both the Mets and Yankees offer plenty of star power and more than enough reason to believe in a second-half resurgence. For a weekend in Queens, though, it might not be as pretty as their ludicrous payrolls would suggest.
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