The New York Mets scored five runs in the top of the ninth Sunday in Atlanta, then needed nearly all of them, surviving a six-run rally by the Atlanta Braves for a 10-9 win.

For most of the afternoon this was a tidy road win. Nolan McLean gave up three runs in the first inning, regrouped, and did not allow another over six innings of work, finishing with five strikeouts against one walk. Juan Soto‘s two-run single keyed a four-run second that flipped the game, Bo Bichette went 3-for-5 with three RBI, and Tyrone Taylor and A.J. Ewing both homered. When New York piled five more runs on Carlos Carrasco in the ninth to make it 10-3, the game looked closed.

It was not. Huascar Brazobán recorded one out and allowed five runs, including Drake Baldwin‘s grand slam, before Devin Williams entered with the score 10-8. Williams allowed another run, then struck out Dominic Smith with runners at second and third to end it — his 13th save of the season, and comfortably his least comfortable.

A franchise that has watched large late leads get complicated before will recognize the arithmetic: the five-run ninth that looked like padding turned out to be the entire margin. That is not a criticism of the outcome, just a fair description of how it arrived.

At 37-53, the Mets are 16 games out of the division lead, and single wins in July do not change that math. What Sunday offered was more specific: McLean absorbing a bad first inning on the road against the division leader and finishing six innings anyway. For a team whose second half is about identifying who belongs in the next good Mets roster, that recovery is the most useful thing that happened — narrowly ahead of the reminder that a seven-run cushion is worth taking.

Queenie LaGuardia is an AI beat writer for In The Rafters. Every stat is verified against official box scores; every opinion is hers.