35 years at Shea: where the Nationals vs Mets story starts

Game one: 44,541 fans and a crying broadcaster

The Baseball-Reference box score puts the crowd at 44,541 and the running time at 3 hours and 35 minutes. Montreal won 11-10. That score undersells how strange the afternoon was. According to SABR's game account by Norm King, McGinn also collected the franchise's first wild pitch, first balk and first pickoff, which is a busy debut for anyone and a remarkable one for a reliever.

The humane detail in King's account is the one I would keep if I could keep only one. As the Canadian opera singer Maureen Forrester sang Canada's anthem, broadcaster Dave Van Horne looked over at his partner Russ Taylor, a Montreal native, and saw tears on his cheeks. Baseball had arrived in Canada, and one of the men describing it could hardly see the field.

New York nearly spoiled it. Down 11-6, the home side scored four in the ninth, three of them on a pinch-hit homer by Duffy Dyer, before Carroll Sembera struck out Rod Gaspar to end it. The next morning, SABR notes, the Montreal Gazette's front page ran the line "Look who's in first place!"

Here is the part I enjoy most. Those Mets had never finished higher than ninth in their first seven seasons, and that October they won the World Series. So a brand-new expansion club beat the eventual champions on the first day it existed. You could not script a better opening scene for a rivalry, and nobody tried to.

The last Montreal game, same ballpark

On September 29, 2004, MLB announced the Expos would move to Washington for 2005, as the franchise history on Wikipedia records. Four days later, on October 3, the Expos played their final game. It was at Shea. The Mets won 8-1 in front of 33,569 people, with Tom Glavine getting the win, per the box score.

Jamey Carroll scored the last Expos run. Endy Chávez made the last out, a grounder to second baseman Jeff Keppinger. His story after that out is so neat it earned its own page: the last Expos batter became a Mets legend with one catch.

One number from that day deserves a caution label. This Day In Baseball gives the Mets a 299-298 edge in 597 games against Montreal since 1969. We could not confirm that tally against a second source, so treat the exact margin as theirs. If it holds, 35 years of Expos and Mets came down to a single game, which feels about right.

Washington picks up the thread

Brad Wilkerson became the first Nationals batter on April 4, 2005. Ten days later the team won its first home game at RFK Stadium, 5-3 over Arizona. Nationals Park opened on March 30, 2008, and in 2019 the franchise won its first World Series, beating Houston four games to three. Montreal never got that parade. Washington did, fifty years after McGinn's homer.

2015, the year it turned personal

Division races make rivalries, and the 2015 NL East did it quickly. Washington signed Max Scherzer on January 21, 2015, to a seven-year, $210 million deal, according to his Wikipedia biography. New York won the division anyway.

Then came October 3, 2015. Yes, the same calendar date as the last Expos game. Scherzer threw a no-hitter at Citi Field, winning 2-0 with 17 strikeouts and no walks. SABR's recap notes it was the night half of a day-night doubleheader, that a throwing error by Yunel Escobar in the sixth was the only thing between Scherzer and a perfect game, and that Mets pitchers struck out 18 of their own. As of 2021, SABR says, it was the only nine-inning game in which each team recorded 17 or more strikeouts.

The players who crossed over

The version of this rivalry I find most interesting is not about standings. It is about people changing dugouts. Daniel Murphy homered in six straight postseason games for the 2015 Mets and was NLCS MVP. On December 24, 2015, he signed with Washington for three years and $37.5 million, then hit .347 with 25 homers and 104 RBIs in 2016 and finished second in NL MVP voting, per his Wikipedia biography). Mets fans had a long summer.

Scherzer went the other way. After winning the 2019 title with Washington and a 2021 trade to the Dodgers, he agreed to a three-year, $130 million contract with the Mets on December 1, 2021, a deal whose $43.3 million average annual value was then the largest in MLB history. The pitcher who no-hit the Mets became one.

Where things stood on the final weekend of 2026

Neither club spent late September chasing October. The Nats Report's game notes had Washington at 76-84 and New York at 73-87 entering September 26, and pointed out that 76 wins was already the Nationals' best total since that 2019 championship team won 93. For a rebuilding club, that is a real step, and it deserves more than a line in a preview.

New York took that Saturday game 7-1 at Nationals Park, with Ronny Mauricio hitting two home runs, according to ESPN. Sunday's season finale was moved from 3:05 p.m. to 1:05 p.m. ET because of a forecast of bad weather, the Nationals announced. Who gets to make that call, and what happens if rain wins anyway, is a surprisingly tidy piece of the rulebook: before lineup cards swap, the home team owns MLB rain calls.

One more thread for Mets fans. SNY noted that Francisco Lindor entered that Sunday with 299 career home runs. Whether No. 300 came on the last afternoon of the season is a question the box score will answer better than I can.

Two outs, one ballpark

The Expos' first game ended on a strikeout of Rod Gaspar at Shea. Their last ended on a grounder to Jeff Keppinger at Shea. Between those two outs sit 35 years, a move south, a championship in a new city and a list of players who wore both uniforms and heard it from both crowds. When the schedule says Nationals vs Mets, that is the history riding in the visiting dugout. It started with a reliever's home run, and that still makes me grin.