The most expensive roster in baseball is 43-51. The two-time defending World Series champions are in Queens. And a 48-year-old basketball writer is about to walk to the Citi Field mound and try to fix all of it.
Zach Lowe throws out the ceremonial first pitch before Saturday night’s Dodgers-Mets game, 7:15 p.m. ET on FOX. It was supposed to happen on June 22. That one got rained out. So the whole thing slid five weeks, into the back half of a lost season, against the best team in the National League — which is to say it has now followed the exact arc of the entire dismal Mets year.
When we previewed the original date, Lowe broke the news himself on The Zach Lowe Show, calling it “a scoop on the Zach Lowe show.” The Mets, he said, had “approached me about a number of things” months earlier, and one of them was the ask: “would you want to throw out the first pitch on June 22nd?”
“Hell yeah,” he said.
Then it rained.
“I’m freaking cursed and the Mets are cursed,” Lowe said.
He is throwing from the rubber
This is the part Lowe wants on the record in advance, with no ambiguity about where his feet will be.
“I feel like I’m going to be in the zone and I’m throwing off the mound,” Lowe said. “I’m not going to do any of this chickenshit, throw it from in front of the mound. I’m not calling anyone out. Okay. Like, there are certain people who literally, they’re too old or too young or too weak to do it. I am an able-bodied 48-year-old male. I am throwing from the rubber.”
Sixty feet, six inches. Saturday night crowd. National television. Full send.
His family has one request, which is that he not look at first base and not embarrass them. His guest on the show had a simpler one: don’t lollipop it.
The invite itself is pure baseball. Lowe is one of the most recognizable analytical voices in basketball, now housed at The Ringer, but he runs a recurring “Mets corner” on his show and the team took notice. By his own cheerful admission, he’s “just a crazy fan” — which is exactly how this came together.
On a later episode, NBC Sports NBA insider Grant Liffmann had a request of his own: that Lowe shake off a sign before delivering.
“When you get out there, do the little flick of the wrist like I’m throwing fastball, right?” Liffmann said.
The most expensive disappointment in baseball
The Mets have the highest payroll in Major League Baseball. Not second. First — and they have been first for four straight seasons, 2023 through 2026, at roughly $352 million in present-day money this year. The Dodgers top them only by competitive balance tax payroll, around $413 million, because Los Angeles defers so much of what it owes that its present-day figure lands under New York’s.
The two clubs have made a genre out of this. Their meeting earlier this season was the most expensive series in the history of the sport, combined payroll and tax bills north of $1.07 billion, breaking a record the same two teams had set the year before.
Here is what that money has bought lately. Over the past season and a half, the Mets are 126-130. A .492 team. Under .500, with the biggest payroll in the sport, while the club across the diamond has won the last two World Series.
And it is not as if last year ended cleanly either. The 2025 Mets were 45-25 through 70 games, sitting in first place by 4.5. They went 38-54 the rest of the way, lost 13 of their final 20, and finished 83-79. The collapse was not a bad week. It was half a season.
Which is the backdrop Lowe has been narrating, gleefully and at length, in Mets corner. Now he has to stand on the mound in front of it.
Can he be the next Grimace?
The bar here is not accuracy. The bar is consequence.
When Grimace threw out the first pitch before a Mets-Marlins game in June 2024, the Mets were buried in the National League East and going nowhere. What followed was a run so improbable that a fast-food mascot became permanent franchise folklore. Mets fans did not decide Grimace was lucky. They decided Grimace was load-bearing.
That is the standard Lowe walks into. Nobody needs him to hit the mitt. They need him to start something. Failing that, they will settle for less embarrassing than the season.
How to watch Dodgers vs. Mets today
Tonight is a national FOX broadcast, which means SNY and the MLB app are blacked out. Here is where to actually find it:
- Sat, July 25 — Dodgers at Mets, Citi Field, 7:15 p.m. ET: FOX (national); stream on Fubo or any service carrying your local FOX. Lowe’s ceremonial first pitch is pregame, weather permitting.
Radio: Audacy Mets Radio, WHSQ 880 AM / 92.3 HD2. Dodgers Radio, AM 570 / KTNQ 1020.
Probables: Yoshinobu Yamamoto (10-6, 2.78 ERA, 113 K) vs. Nolan McLean (7-6, 3.34 ERA, 135 K).
Los Angeles took Friday’s opener 4-2. The Dodgers are 66-38.
Baseball without borders
The pitching matchup is the international story of the night. Yamamoto came to Los Angeles from the Orix Buffaloes as the most decorated arm in modern Nippon Professional Baseball, and he has spent 2026 pitching like it.
Opposite him is a converted college shortstop from Willow Spring, North Carolina, who turned 24 on Friday. McLean was added to the United States’ 2026 World Baseball Classic staff last December alongside Mets teammate Clay Holmes and Minnesota’s Joe Ryan, behind Paul Skenes — and drew the Game 4 start against Italy.
A kid from a town of 2,000 against a pitcher who crossed an ocean to get here. And before either of them throws, a basketball writer from The Ringer who just wants his family not to be embarrassed.
The Mets are 43-51. Weirder things have worked.
Source: The Ringer’s Zach Lowe Show — https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-zach-lowe-show
