ESPN’s Buster Olney is one of the best to ever do it when it comes to baseball writing, but the baseball gods always seem to be messing with Olney when he tweets about anything have to do with the New York Mets.<\/p>\n
Thursday’s Opening Day victory for the Mets provided the most recent example. When Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Brandon Lowe opened up Major League Baseball’s 2026 home run ledger with a dinger disguised as a fly out in the top of the first, Olney’s Twitter\/X fingers immediately went to work<\/a>. <\/p>\n Buster Olney’s Brandon Lowe tweet aged horrifically, and Mets fans are loving it<\/p>\n “If the Pirates make the playoffs, the narrative starts with that Lowe homer,” Olney posted.<\/p>\n If the Pirates make the playoffs, the narrative starts with that Lowe homer.<\/p>\n \u2014 Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) March 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Within minutes, Olney’s tweet aged terribly. In the bottom half of the inning, the Mets blew up Paul Skenes and the Pirates for five runs<\/a>, thanks in large part to a pair of grievous errors from center fielder Oneil Cruz, whose sunglass-less eyes were battling the midday sun and badly lost<\/a>.<\/p>\n To Olney’s credit, he took the L in stride, playfully saluting fans who were roasting him in the post’s comments.<\/p>\n You nailed it!<\/p>\n \u2014 Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) March 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n The Mets went on to win Opening Day (per usual) by a score of 11-7, and there were plenty of memorable moments after the first inning, most of all Carson Benge’s first-MLB-hit-home-run glory that followed a dead bird falling next to Benge in right field. Omens everywhere.<\/p>\n When the pomp had subsided on the Mets’ victory, however, it was hard not to humourously return to Olney’s post and realize that Buster just keeps on sending awful Mets-related predictions into the universe.<\/p>\n At the outset of the decade, Olney said he would “bet the family farm”<\/a> that the Mets were about to sign George Springer (update: they never did). More recently, Olney said it was “inevitable” that the Mets were going to sign either Ranger Su\u00e1rez or Framber Valdez this past offseason<\/a>. Nothing good on that front for Buster, either.<\/p>\n At least the Mets were on the right side of Olney’s bad prediction this time around. Even as Lowe followed up his first-pitch homer with a second blast off of Freddy Peralta, the Mets remained in control from the bottom of the first until the final out of Thursday’s opener. <\/p>\n Having vanquished the immortal beast that is Skenes, the Mets will now face Mitch Keller and Carmen Mlodzinski over the weekend at Citi, with David Peterson (Saturday) and Nolan McLean on the mound for New York. Keep an eye on Olney’s Twitter feed throughout the ordeal.<\/p>\n