This series has been a stress test for anyone who still believes in the Mets bullpen. On July 5, New York carried a 10-3 lead into the ninth inning against the Braves, the kind of cushion that should end a broadcast early. Instead Atlanta started chipping away, and Barstool Baseball's timeline lit up with the obvious question.
The Braves cut a 10-3 Mets lead down to 10-8 in the 9th, capped by a home run that had everyone bracing for the worst.
The Mets held on that night, but not before Clem's timeline had already started drafting the pink slip. "Gotta fire Mendoza again if you lose this game," TheClemReport posted mid-collapse, the kind of half-joking, fully-serious take that follows this team around now whenever a lead starts shrinking.
Gotta fire Mendoza again if you lose this game
New York did close it out that game, and Barstool Baseball made sure to clarify the record with a follow-up: the Mets did not, in fact, blow a 10-3 ninth-inning lead. That's the bar the bullpen is being graded on right now — not whether they pitch well, but whether they simply avoid historic collapse.
The bit didn't stop there. This is the same Mets front office that made "run prevention" its offseason mantra under David Stearns, who has repeatedly said limiting runs allowed was the club's top offseason priority. Frank Fleming wasn't buying the branding after watching Atlanta keep hanging crooked numbers.
Maybe David Sterns meant to say Win Prevention when he said Run Prevention
The bigger blowup came the next night. Matt Olson turned into the whole series' villain, going deep twice against New York, including a game-tying two-run shot with two outs in the ninth. Before that, he'd already put the Braves ahead early, and Barstool Baseball caught the moment live.
Matt Olson gives the Braves an early lead, the first of two homers he'd hit that night.
Then came the answer. Juan Soto, still in the middle of his record-setting Mets contract, delivered a go-ahead ninth-inning homer — 430 feet, 107.8 mph off the bat — that briefly looked like the exclamation point on a wild win. Fleming, who has spent the series poking at the Mets' other big offseason infield addition, framed it as validation.
It didn't settle anything. Olson answered right back, tying the game again off Devin Williams and sending the Mets bullpen meltdown discourse into overdrive. Barstool Baseball barely had time to post the Soto homer before it was posting the response.
New York eventually won that game in extra innings. But the process, not the results, is fueling the pile-on. Fleming summed up the frustration bluntly, tying Olson's homer directly back to the same defensive and bullpen issues that turned the previous night's 10-3 laugher into a nail-biter.
That's the joke writing itself around this Mets team right now: they keep winning, and it keeps feeling like they're losing. Stearns built this roster around cutting down runs allowed, and instead the Mets are making a habit of needing a Soto moonshot just to survive a series against a Braves lineup that shouldn't be this competitive. If the bullpen doesn't tighten up before the stakes get higher, Mendoza's seat is going to keep getting the internet's attention regardless of what the win column says.