Six errors sink Syracuse Mets in 13-5 loss to RailRiders

Six Syracuse errors turned Tuesday night at PNC Field into a long, expensive exercise in survival, and the RailRiders finished it with a 13-5 win over the Mets in Moosic, Pennsylvania. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre got the first leverage, the Mets kept giving it back, and the final margin reflected how many extra outs Syracuse handed away.

The damage started early. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre scored twice in the first inning and once more in the third, then Kenedy Corona stretched the lead with a little league home run in the fourth to make it 4-0. At that point the Mets were already fighting an uphill game, but the errors made the hill steeper. Every miscue extended an inning, forced another pitch sequence, and gave the RailRiders another chance to cash in before Syracuse could clean up the mess.

Syracuse did push back with three runs in the fifth, briefly making the game look salvageable. The official Mets recap said Syracuse pulled within one before Scranton/Wilkes-Barre scored nine of the final 11 runs, and that is the telltale line from a game that spiraled on fundamentals rather than one clean burst from the home side. Five runs is usually enough to keep a Triple-A game competitive. Five runs with six errors is how a box score gets away from you.

That is what makes this loss more revealing than the 13-5 final itself. Defensive mistakes do not just show up in the error column. They change the inning’s math. A routine out that becomes a live runner forces a pitcher to work from the stretch, adds stress to the next at-bat, and raises the chance that a harmless frame becomes a crooked number. By the time the Mets tried to climb back in, they had already spent too many pitches and too many clean chances trying to undo their own damage.

Elmer Rodríguez earned the win for Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, while Jack Wenninger took the loss for Syracuse. The RailRiders’ lead held and kept growing because the Mets never stopped paying for the same kind of mistake: an inning that should have ended, but did not.

The series flipped quickly. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre beat Syracuse again 5-4 the next night, but the 13-5 result was the one that exposed the sharper problem. This was not just a bad scoreline. It was a night when Syracuse’s defense stopped the game from ever settling into shape.