Mets Give Up Inside-the-Park Grand Slam to Nationals’ James Wood After Embarrassing Outfield Miscue
The New York Mets were up 5-0 in Washington on Tuesday night. They left the second inning down 5-4 after one of the dumbest defensive plays of the 2026 MLB season.
It was an inside-the-park grand slam. By the Nationals. Against the Mets. With everything that could go wrong going wrong on a single ball off the bat of James Wood.
Wood, the Nationals’ All-Star outfielder, came up with the bases loaded and two outs against Mets starter Nolan McLean. McLean threw him a first-pitch fastball that Wood went the other way with, lining a shot to deep left field at Nationals Park.
Mets left fielder Nicholas Morabito got back on the warning track and tried for a leaping catch. He came up empty. The ball bounced off the wall and rolled in the warning track area as Morabito went sprawling.
Here is where the play went into the bloopers reel. Center fielder Tyrone Taylor, watching from a distance, somehow thought Morabito had made the catch. Taylor stopped. Just stood there. Stared at his teammate while the actual ball was still rolling around behind Morabito’s body.
Morabito eventually got up, found the baseball, picked it up, and tried to fire a relay throw to the cutoff. By the time the ball reached the infield, every single Nationals runner had crossed the plate. Including Wood, the batter, who simply ran the bases and watched his own grand slam unfold around him.
James Wood. Little League. Grand slam. The Nationals’ official social account captioned it exactly that way. The clip went around the league within the hour. It was the kind of play scouts only see on minor league fields, except it happened in front of a major league crowd between two NL East teams that should know better.
What made it worse for the Mets was the cumulative effect. They jumped on Nationals starter Mitchell Parker for five runs in the top of the second. They were up 5-0. The whole inning felt routine. And then in the bottom half, with two outs and the bases loaded, one swing flipped the entire game.
The Nationals went on to score five more runs by the fourth inning, eventually leading 9-5 over the Mets.
The Mets have been climbing out of a 12-game losing streak from April. They had won six of seven before Tuesday night. They sit at 21-26 now and Tuesday’s game showed just how thin the margin is for a team trying to convince itself the season can still be saved.
Manager Carlos Mendoza is going to want to bury the outfield communication video. He cannot. Every analyst on MLB Network ran the clip on loop. Mets fans will rewatch it in nightmares.
This is the second Little League grand slam allowed in the National League over the past month. Fernando Tatis Jr. and the Padres gave one up to the Nationals’ JJ Wetherholt earlier this month. James Wood made it two in May for the Nationals. Washington might be the new home of weird baseball, but the Mets just gave them a Tuesday gift nobody on either side will forget.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
