Sean Manaea Pitches the Game of His Life Hours After Losing His Aunt

Facing a Phillies team that had dealt him a crushing blow two years ago, the Mets’ Game 3 starter pitched with a heavy heart Tuesday and put New York one win away from the NLCS.

Entering Tuesday, Manaea had a 10.66 ERA in four postseason appearances (three starts). / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Bad news has neither decorum nor sense of timing. It travels fast and it travels with insolence. When Talat Manaea’s phone rang Tuesday morning, it interrupted life with its dreaded rudeness.

She was at home with her husband, New York Mets pitcher Sean Manaea, just hours before he was to pitch the most important game of his life, Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies at Citi Field. 

The news was about Sean’s Aunt Mabel. Maybeline Glasshagel of Wanatah, Indiana, had passed away. Talat knew Sean was very close to his Aunt Mabel.

“At first I didn’t know whether I should tell him or not,” Talat says. “Here he is getting ready to pitch. I was torn. But then I thought, He should know. He loves her.”

She told him.

The greatest measure of a man is not in what he achieves but in what he endures. Manaea is a 32-year-old pitcher who endured the worst moment of his nine-year career the last time he pitched a postseason game against the Phillies. He gave up five runs in 1 1/3 innings in a 2022 NLCS Game 4 loss, after which he returned to his hotel room and told himself, “Something has to change.” Right then and there he looked up the email for Driveline Baseball, the high-tech player development program, and went about making change happen.

This January, his older brother, David, who had been like a second father to him, died of cancer at age 59. Sean that month signed with the Mets, a veritable afterthought on the free agent market late in the winter who settled for a one-year deal with a player option. To honor David, he asked to wear uniform No. 59.

“When I told him about Mabel,” Talat says, “I prayed that she would be out there with him. I said, Please, Mabel, help guide his pitches.’’

With a heavy heart, and while wearing the number that honors his deceased brother, Sean Manaea pitched the game of his life: seven innings of one-run baseball that not only earned him his first postseason victory but also put the Mets one win away from playing for the NL pennant. The Mets have never clinched a postseason series at Citi Field since the ballpark opened in 2009, but they can do so Wednesday in Game 4.

Manaea’s pitching line was superb. He allowed only three hits, all singles, walked two, struck out six and attacked the Phillies by throwing 71% strikes. But the best story of the night was written not in the box score but in what he endured.

“My aunt, she just passed away this morning,” Manaea says. “Yeah. That's what’s so crazy. I was very close to her.”

His voice started to crack. Tears began to well in his eyes.

“Yeah, crazy,” he continues. “Crazy how that works, you know?”

I asked him if his aunt had died suddenly.

“It was very, um … I wouldn’t say suddenly exactly, but … I mean, it was just …”

He could not complete the sentence. There had not been enough time, especially on a game day, for him to process her loss and grieve properly.

He had honored Aunt Mabel with a game that required fortitude. Manaea held a 2–0 lead entering the sixth when he suddenly lost the plate, walking two batters. The next hitter, representing the go-ahead run, was Bryce Harper, who had homered off a sweeper from Manaea in London in June. Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner walked to the mound to talk to Manaea. This was the pivotal point of what tends to be the pivotal game of a five-game series.

“I don't know how other pitching coaches necessarily treat mound visits,” Hefner says, “but I try to keep them very simple and to the point and always talking about what's about to happen and not what has happened.

“So, [I’m] never mentioning the fact that he just walked two guys. And I feel like when you say ‘slow the game down,’ then you're giving light to what has happened. So, it was all about how we were going to get Harper out and that he was the right guy for this spot.”

Manaea pitched with a special purpose in Game 3. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Harper was geared to let his bat fly against a first-pitch fastball. Manaea threw a changeup. It was not perfectly located—more up than down—but Manaea had sold the pitch so well with fastball arm speed that Harper’s barrel had passed through the zone before the ball arrived. Harper seemed stunned by the pitch choice. He had seen only two changeups out of 51 pitches from Manaea in his career, never on a first pitch.

Until two months ago, Manaea’s changeup could best be described as an afterthought for someone who relies heavily on sinkers and sweepers. It grades out as the worst of his six pitches. Through the end of June, hitters were batting .317 against his changeup. He did not trust the pitch against lefties. He threw only 10 changes to lefties in those first four months.

But then Manaea, as he did after the 2022 low point when he began working with weighted balls and technology for the first time, sold out on doing something about it. Around that time is when Manaea changed his delivery (no more hands over the head) and his arm angle (he lowered his release point and moved it even farther off-set from the rubber). He also changed his changeup. With Hefner’s help, he developed a one-seam grip that resulted in more depth on the pitch.

“The changeup’s really never been a pitch for him in his career,” Hefner says. “It's usually been a fastball and a breaking ball. So, we found a grip about the time that he made the mechanical change. And we just kind of kept tinkering with it. Now his confidence is growing in that pitch. I'm glad it showed up big for us tonight.”

After the grip change, hitters batted just .139 against his changeup. The Phillies had no clue what to do with it. They had never seen Manaea throw more than 19% changeups the three times they faced him this year. In NLCS Game 3 they saw him lean on the pitch 25% of the time. Manaea obtained seven swings and misses on the pitch, the most for him all year.

More depth and more swing and miss. “That's all the things that we've been talking about and trying to work on with the changeup,” Hefner says. “That’s all credit to Sean because he's never satisfied. He always wants to get better.”

The changeup use was preloaded into the game plan, though Manaea did lean on it more the second and third times through the lineup.

“We felt like they were going to be a little bit more aggressive against Sean,” Hefner says. “Just because the previous two times he'd thrown a lot of fastballs. So, yeah, we're going to slow them down and mix it up just a little bit more with the changeup.”

Ahead 0-and-1 to Harper, Manaea wasted no time putting him away with two outside sweepers, one on the edge of the zone and the next farther out. Harper chased both and struck out.

He still needed two outs to escape the inning. Nick Castellanos hit next. Manaea jumped ahead 0-and-2. It was time for another changeup the hitter would not be expecting. Hefner knew Castellanos had seen Manaea’s changeup well in London, hammering one for a home run.

“So, we kind of saved it for a spot where maybe it would surprise him,” Hefner says.

Manaea threw it at 0-and-2. Castellanos reacted late and hit a line drive directly to second baseman Jose Iglesias, who stepped on second base to double up Kyle Schwarber. In just six pitches, Manaea had escaped a two-on, no-out dumpster fire.

“[Castellanos] put a good swing on the ball and hit it right at Jose,” Hefner says. “We didn’t talk about that during the mound visit, but that was me and Ali [catcher Francisco Alvarez] talking through before the game when to use the changeup.”

After two see-saw games, there would be no lead changes this time, not with Manaea on the mound and not with the Phillies’ pitching staff again having enormous difficulty getting third outs against this relentless New York lineup. The Mets scored six of their seven runs in Game 3 with two outs.

By the time Manaea went back out for the eighth, the Mets were up 6–0. Phillies manager Rob Thomson made a crucial mistake of using Jose Alvarado, rusty and erratic, in a 4–0 playoff game. Alvarado promptly coughed up two enormous runs.

When Edmundo Sosa, Philadelphia’s leadoff batter in the eighth, reached on an infield single, New York manager Carlos Mendoza removed Manaea from the game. He did so only after a long visit on the mound in which he expressed how proud he was of Manaea’s effort.

Manaea walked off the mound in the eighth inning with a 6–0 lead. / Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

One of the most beautiful moments a starting pitcher can experience is walking off the mound in front of a sold-out home crowd after a job well done. It’s the pitcher’s version of a home run trot. It is the reward of exertion, exhaustion and execution. In this case Manaea gave the home fans 91 of his level-best pitches. They had no idea of the heaviness of his heart, only the determination that pulled him through a game that almost went sideways. They bathed him in the appreciation of applause. Manaea tipped his cap and threw a kiss to the crowd. Then he looked to the heavens and gave a kiss toward Aunt Mabel.

I told Hefner about his starting pitcher taking the ball with such a heavy heart. It was the first he heard of it. He had no idea.

“No, he didn't mention anything,” Hefner says. “Oh, man, I didn't know. I just saw him, and he didn't say anything. He gave away nothing. It's crazy that something like that happens and still you go out there with all those emotions and still pitch like that.

“Wow. That's incredible.”

It was two years ago in a postseason game against the Phillies that Manaea suffered the worst moment of his major league career. After a two-year journey of rebuilding himself as a pitcher, seeing the Phillies in the postseason again brought him to his best moment. Asked if on this night he could think about that night in 2022, Manaea allows a wry smile and says, “Are you kidding? It has lived in my head for two years.”

Talat was there at Citi Field to watch Sean pitch the game of his life. She wore a long-sleeved shirt with his number—David’s number—bedazzled with rhinestones. In each of the eight innings Sean walked to that mound she thought about Aunt Mabel, and how such a heavy loss could be a part of such a memorable win.

“She was out there tonight with him,” Talat says. “I know she was.”

“It must have been a difficult choice for you,” I told her, thinking about the insolence of bad news, “but he honored her tonight. He was inspired.”

“Inspired,” Talat says. “I like that word. That’s what tonight was. Inspired.”