Juan Soto returns to Miami with the New York Mets on May 22, 2026, as the club opens a series against the Miami Marlins that still carries the sting of last season’s finale.
The records are close on paper — the Mets at 22-28 and the Marlins at 22-29 — but history presses. New York was shut out 4-0 in the final game of 2025 in Miami, a loss that kept the Mets out of the postseason. Miami also took seven of the 13 meetings between the clubs last year, a reminder that this matchup has tilted in the Marlins’ favor recently.
The immediate backdrop before the trip south was mixed. New York arrived having just split a four-game set in Washington, D.C., a 2-2 outcome highlighted by wildly different scores: a 16-7 win and a 2-1 win bookended by 9-6 and 8-4 losses. Soto was part of that offensive surge: he went 6-for-16 with three home runs in the Nationals series and has hit five home runs in his last eight games, a streak stretching back to May 14.
Other individual notes from that Washington slate reinforce the unsettled picture. Bo Bichette homered three times across the four games and finished 7-for-18. Carson Benge finished the series with eight hits and has been New York’s hottest bat in May, slashing.351/.400/.459 after a slow April that produced a.189/.247/.289 line and a team-worst.525 OPS among qualified hitters at the end of that month.
The series in Miami is being framed unmistakably against last fall’s finale. The Mets return to a ballpark where a 4-0 defeat ended their 2025 postseason push. That loss, and Miami’s edge in last year’s head-to-head (winning seven of 13), make this set more than an ordinary late-May road trip for New York; it is a chance to reverse a recent pattern that cost them dearly.
Tension sits where it often does in baseball: between one player’s form and the team’s results. Soto’s power surge is a clear, current asset — five homers in eight games is the sort of run that can change a short series — but it arrives amid team inconsistency. The Mets’ ledger, their split in Washington and the memory of being blanked in Miami last season, all push against the idea that one hot bat will solve deeper problems.
For the Marlins, the facts are blunt and simple: they beat the Mets more often than not in 2025 and sit with a nearly identical record entering the series. For New York, the aim will be to translate Soto’s recent hot streak into runs in the lineup and to make sure pitching and situational defense limit the kind of scoreless outing that decided last year’s finale.
If the Mets can ride Soto’s power and the May form of players like Benge, they can flip a rivalry that leaned the other way in 2025. If they cannot, the 4-0 finish in Miami will remain an unmistakable touchstone for a team still trying to find consistent footing. The single, sharpening question when the Mets take the field Tuesday is this: can Soto’s current surge produce enough runs to keep the Mets from repeating Miami’s season-defining silence?
