WBC Final Rematch Tonight
Tonight’s Mets vs. D‑backs matchup features a rematch of the 2026 World Baseball Classic final pitchers — Nolan McLean and Eduardo Rodríguez — giving an early‑season game extra narrative weight. (x.com) That kind of storyline can flip a routine April game into a must‑watch for fans who followed the WBC. (x.com)
An April game at Citi Field is getting a March memory attached to it: the same two pitchers who opened the 2026 World Baseball Classic final are back on the mound Thursday night, with Arizona sending Eduardo Rodríguez against the Mets’ Nolan McLean at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time. The last time these two faced each other was March 17 in Miami, when Venezuela beat the United States 3-2 for its first World Baseball Classic title. Rodríguez gave Venezuela 4 1/3 scoreless innings, and McLean kept Team USA close with 4 2/3 innings and four strikeouts. That is what makes this one feel different from a normal first week of the regular season game: the uniforms changed, but the matchup did not. In the Classic, Rodríguez was pitching for Venezuela and McLean for the United States; on Thursday, Rodríguez is starting for the Diamondbacks and McLean for the Mets. Rodríguez is the older name in the duel, a left-hander in his eleventh Major League Baseball season who is trying to reset after a 5.02 earned run average in 2025. His first two starts of 2026 have looked sharp enough that he brings a 0.00 earned run average into Queens. McLean is the newer part of the story, because he is still only 24 and only recently stopped looking like a prospect and started looking like a fixture. After posting a 2.06 earned run average in 48 innings for the Mets last season, he has opened 2026 with a 2.61 earned run average and 12 strikeouts in two starts. The setting adds one more layer. This is the finale of a three-game series at Citi Field, and the winner takes the series, so the game has a little of the winner-advances tension that made the Classic final so easy to remember. There is also a neat reversal in the numbers. Rodríguez dominated Team USA in the title game, but his only career start at Citi Field last season went badly, with eight runs allowed in four innings; McLean, by contrast, is 2-0 with a 0.92 earned run average in five career starts at Citi Field. So the draw tonight is not just Mets versus Diamondbacks. It is a national-team championship game echo showing up three weeks later in a regular-season ballpark, with one pitcher trying to prove his Classic run was a carryover and the other trying to turn a close loss on the biggest stage into a win at home.
