Somewhere in Queens, someone's going to have to explain to Nolan McLean why six scoreless innings and six strikeouts add up to a no-decision in a one-run loss. That's baseball's oldest cruelty, and it happened again Sunday at Rate Field, where the Mets fell 2-1 to the Chicago White Sox on a walk-off homer from Tristan Peters in the ninth.
The individual result matters less than the pattern it fits into. This was Chicago's 11th walk-off win of the season and Peters' third, and if you want one stat that captures who this White Sox team has become, that's it. Teams don't stumble into that many ninth-inning finishes by accident. At some point a knack for late-game chaos stops being a fluke and turns into an identity. The Mets just spent a weekend on the wrong end of it twice, dropping the series opener before winning the middle game behind Luis Robert's big afternoon back at his old ballpark.
The cruelest part, if you're wearing orange and blue, is how avoidable the ending felt. Jared Young tied it in the top of the ninth with a single, erasing an eighth-inning Chicago lead that Andrew Benintendi had created with a double. For a few minutes, the Mets had rescued McLean's outing and stolen the finale. Then Kodai Senga threw a pitch that Peters put into the center-field seats, and the whole thing evaporated.
This isn't really a Senga referendum, even though the loss dropped him to 0-9 and even though a pitch like that is exactly what fuels the pile-on. He's in the middle of a real transition year, working through diminished command and a shift toward higher-leverage relief innings rather than a full rotation slot. One bad fastball on a Sunday in Chicago doesn't settle whether that project works. It does remind you how unforgiving that kind of experiment looks when it fails in front of a stadium.
The bigger story is Chicago. This is the same team that lost an MLB-record 121 games in 2024 and followed it with another sub-.500 season in 2025. Now they can take a series from a good Mets club with a walk-off flourish, chasing a playoff spot that would make them the first team ever to reach the postseason after back-to-back 100-loss years. They sat at 67-62 entering Sunday, and while that record is just a snapshot from one morning in a season that still has weeks to run, the trajectory behind it is the real headline. The Mets have five weeks to figure out how to close a series like this one. The White Sox, evidently, have figured out how to end one.
