Pittsburgh Pirates relief pitcher Carmen Mlodzinski (50) and catcher Henry Davis (32) celebrate after a sweep of the New York Mets at PNC Park. Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

Pirates sweep of Mets featured some baffling, historic numbers

By Adam Gretz | Last updated Jun 29, 2025 6:21 PM ET

The 2025 New York Mets are, generally speaking, a very good baseball team. The 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates are, objectively, a very bad baseball team. Those two facts alone made the Pirates' three-game weekend sweep — capped off with an emphatic 12-1 win on Sunday — improbable enough.

It's not what anybody expected going into the weekend, especially with the Pirates not even throwing their best pitcher — Paul Skenes — in any of the games.

But it's not just that the Pirates won three straight games against the Mets, it's the way they won those games, absolutely dominating in a way that few teams have ever dominated another opponent in a three-game series.

Take, for example, this sequence of numbers that no other team has ever matched in a three-game series:

MLB teams since 1901 to score 30+ runs, allow 4 or fewer runs and strike out 25+ batters in a three-game series:

Pirates - this weekend vs. Mets

That’s it. pic.twitter.com/0ulK56MLb0
— Greg Harvey (@BetweenTheNums) June 29, 2025

For the three game set the Pirates outscored the Mets by a 30-4 margin and hit five home runs, including four on Sunday.

It's an extremely poor showing for New York and continues what has been a two-plus week slide that has seen what was at one time a 5.5-game lead in the division slip away, dropping the team into second place.

It's even more baffling when you consider the Pittsburgh offense is one of the worst baseball and had only scored 31 runs over its previous eight games entering the weekend series with the Mets.

Sunday's loss came less than 24 hours after the Mets held a player's only meeting on Saturday night following their 9-2 loss. Whatever message they were trying to get through in that meeting obviously did not get through.

It is not going to get any easier over the next few games as they have a three-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers and a three-game series against the New York Yankees on the horizon. They need the All-Star break, or some sort of a trade, as much as any team in baseball right now.

Adam Gretz

Adam Gretz is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh. He covers the NHL, NFL, MLB and NBA. Baseball is his favorite sport -- he is nearly halfway through his goal of seeing a game in every MLB ballpark. Catch him on Twitter @AGretz

More must-reads: