NEW YORK — Carlos Mendoza has seen plenty of Luke Weaver’s outings from both sides of New York, so on an emotional Saturday night, the Mets manager knew he was going to get the best out of his setup man in the most important juncture of the game.
For his first outing against the Yankees, his former team, Weaver was pressed into action with the Mets leading by two runs with the bases loaded and no outs in the seventh inning.
“It’s just the body language there,” Mendoza said. “I think he hit 98 (mph). It’s just the way the ball was coming out. He was attacking. And then executing. The way he mixed his pitches. He wasn’t afraid to use the fastball, but then he used the changeup when he needed to. That shows you right there that he’s on.”
Weaver struck out Amed Rosario and Trent Grisham and induced a ground ball from Anthony Volpe to silence the Yankees at the most important moment of the game. Then, he went back out, shook off a single with a double play and induced a fly ball from Aaron Judge to boost the Mets to a 6-3 victory in front of 41,067 fans on Saturday night at Citi Field.
“It’s just a cool moment. That’s why you play the game,” Weaver said. “It’s just things that come out of you, the moment gets big, you try to find a way to channel it, not panic, not get stressed out. It’s pretty stressful. Just sticking with the routine, just trusting that each pitch is going to work and sometimes it does.”
There were many layers to the performance for Weaver, who is a close friend of Clay Holmes going back to their days with the Yankees. Weaver helped the Mets hold on one day after Holmes suffered a fractured fibula in the team’s 5-2 loss.
Holmes’ injury worsened the Mets’ dismal start to the 2026 season, which includes a disappointing 19-26 record and other maladies throughout the roster, including to Francisco Lindor, Francisco Alvarez, Luis Robert Jr., Jorge Polanco and other.
That made Saturday’s performance actually somewhat healing.
“What a great guy, great friend, what a great year he’s been having too, so you just kind of feel like there’s a little bit of a bug that we’ve had,” Weaver said. “Teams go through that stuff, but it just feels never-ending sometimes, especially in the midst of what’s going on with us this year, but it’s games like tonight where every day has an opportunity to try to hit the refresh button and kind of make the most of it.”
The Yankees were bearing down in the frame against Brooks Raley after a leadoff double by Judge followed by an error by Carson Benge when he misplayed a fly ball that glanced off his glove to allow a run to score. Raley, who came on one inning earlier in the sixth, hit Goldschmidt to load the bases and then got unlucky on a Jazz Chisholm Jr. bunt that looped over his head on the mound to load the bases.
Mendoza turned to Weaver in a huge spot.
When Weaver was asked about playing on both sides of the Subway Series on Friday, he said that he reveled in the chance to be tested in the intensity of a crosstown rivalry.
Weaver revitalized his career with the Yankees late in 2023, became one of their trusted high-leverage arms in 2024 and went through some ups and downs in 2025 before signing a two-year, $22 million deal to swap boroughs in the offseason.
He fed off that emotional reunion, striking out Rosario and Grisham both on changeups before getting Volpe to roll over a fastball.
“You just take a second and there was some great advice from (Jose Rosado), our bullpen coach, and was just like, ‘Don’t worry about everything. Just worry about one pitch at a time,'” Weaver said. “I felt like that was a pretty good thing to say for me, because it can be taxing to try to figure out you’ve got to do everything at one. When you just chip away and you build off the momentum and you get strike one, good things can happen.”
And the moment came full circle when he was able to get Judge, his former teammate, to fly out to end his second inning of work.
“It was just a cool opportunity to finish that outing against one of the greatest we’ve ever seen and one of the best people you’ve ever known, so it was just a cool day.”
It was moments like Saturday’s that fuel Weaver in the most mundane of outings throughout the season.
And maybe, just maybe, a victory like Saturday’s can infuse some vigor into a Mets team that could badly use a reversal in emotions.
“I think tonight, I wanted people to know, especially my teammates, that’s what we’re capable of,” Weaver said. “We can beat great teams in this league. It just takes some fundamental baseball. It takes big moments. It takes some mistakes that we bounce back from, and ultimately, you’re just trying to get on the right side of it.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Mets Luke Weaver shines against former team Yankees in clutch effort