Heriberto Hernandez is a 26-year-old bench player who was hitting .159 this season — not a slump, a persistent state of barely existing at the major league level — and on Saturday afternoon he hit a pinch-hit walk-off grand slam off Devin Williams in a 0-0 game in the ninth inning to complete a three-game sweep of the New York Mets. The Marlins won 4-0. The Mets scored two total runs in the series. New York is 22-31 and last in the NL East.
Per the Elias Sports Bureau via AP, this was the seventh time in MLB history a walk-off grand slam has broken a 0-0 tie — and the first since Justin Maxwell did it for the Kansas City Royals in September 2013. Seven times. Ever. The Mets are the victim of one of them.
That is not bad luck. That is a gravitational field.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2058647635397873994
Walk through what Williams actually did in that ninth inning, because the decision chain matters. He entered with a clean 0-0 game. Leadoff double by Christopher Morel — fine, that happens. Sanoja bunted him to third — now there’s one out and a runner on third, uncomfortable but manageable. Williams then walked Liam Hicks. And then — this is the part — he intentionally walked Xavier Edwards to load the bases for Hernandez, the theory being that a double-play was the better gamble. Williams chose to fill the bases, in a 0-0 game, in the ninth inning, to face a pinch hitter with a .159 average. He served an 83.9 mph changeup. Hernandez hit it 416 feet at 104.9 mph exit velocity to dead center. Grand slam. Sweep. Goodbye.
The IBB is the tell. It wasn’t a sequence that spun out of control — Williams engineered the catastrophe.
This is also not Williams’s first time doing this to the Mets in a scoreless game. Back in April, during New York’s 12-game losing streak, he blew a 0-0 save against the Cubs in the ninth — former Met Michael Conforto tied it with an RBI double and the Cubs won in extras. The Sports Illustrated headline at the time read: “The Devin Williams Experiment Is Already Falling Apart.” His 2026 ERA sits at 4.32 with a 1.44 WHIP. The Mets paid premium money for a proven closer and received a man who now has two separate scoreless-game implosions on his ledger.
A pattern is just a coincidence until it happens twice.
The broader season context does not improve things. New York entered 2026 with FanGraphs playoff odds at 79.5%. They hit a 12-game losing streak in April — their worst since 2004 — and bottomed out at 7-16. They’ve been shut out six times this year and scored one run or fewer in fifteen games. Juan Soto was scratched Saturday with a fever, which is fitting in the way that only Mets things are fitting: the best player on the roster sidelined by a flu while a .159 bench player makes history against your closer.
My Cardinals are 29-22 right now. Second place in the NL Central, seven games better than the Mets. Same league. Comparable payroll expectations. The difference is not talent — the Mets have talent. The difference is that functional NL teams do not lose to Heriberto Hernandez in the ninth inning of a scoreless game because their closer decided loading the bases was the intelligent play.
At some point, “bad luck” stops being a diagnosis and becomes a character trait.
The Mets cannot keep doing this. But they also keep doing this. Those two sentences have coexisted all season, and the Cardinals keep winning games while the rest of the NL East watches New York find new architecture for the same collapse.
Hernandez is probably back in the dugout by Tuesday. Williams will be back out there by Wednesday. The Mets will find another way.
