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Put bluntly, it was not a great Opening Weekend for the Mets -- especially on offense.

New York lost two out of three against the Houston Astros, scoring a total of five runs in the three games and culminating with getting one hit in a 2-1 loss on Saturday. Even in their lone win, the Mets pushed across just three runs and managed only five hits.

But the weekend wasn't all bad for New York whose bullpen pitched 9.2 innings without allowing a run. In fact, throughout the series the Mets were able to get all eight relievers into a game, with all eight looking good in the process.

Max Kranick's return to MLB

Saturday saw the team debut of Kranick who last pitched in the majors in 2022 for the Pittsburgh Pirates. His first order of business back on the job? Coming in to face Yordan Alvarez with the bases loaded and one out in a one-run game in the bottom of the eighth inning. Not exactly the "soft spot" that manager Carlos Mendoza was hoping to use the right-hander for in his first MLB appearance in three years.

And still, Kranick managed to escape the jam unscathed with a foul pop out and groundout to give his team a chance in the ninth. "Huge, huge," Mendoza said about Kranick's performance.

"My heart was definitely racing," Kranick said. "It feels good to get the jitters and the first one out of the way. I’m happy with how it went."

Kranick earned himself a spot on the Opening Day roster thanks to his spectacular spring training. And after getting the first one out of the way after all these years and an arduous journey following Tommy John surgery, he's excited to show the Mets what he can bring to the table out of the bullpen.

"It’s been tough the past couple years," he said. "I was really anxious to get the first one out of the way and hopefully keep rolling."

Jose Siri's impact

Siri made his first start of the season (and first with New York) on Saturday after Tyrone Taylor got the start in center field for the first two games. While he did strike out twice in two at-bats in the No. 9 hole, he also worked a walk, stole a base and scored the team's only run manufactured entirely by him.

Down 1-0 in the sixth, Siri led off the inning with a walk, stole second, advanced to third on a fly out and scored the tying run on a groundout to the pitcher, breaking for home plate after Houston starter Spencer Arrighetti turned his back on Siri to get the out at first base.

"That's instincts right there," Mendoza said about the heads up play. "He can impact and help you win baseball games in a lot of different ways, not only with his defense, with his legs, with the way he runs the bases. But he’s also got power so he’s a good player with a lot of tools that he’s gonna impact this team in a good way moving forward."

It'll be interesting to see how the center field position gets divvied up this season as both Siri and Taylor, two excellent defenders, bat from the right side. Taylor went 1-for-8 in his two starts.

Griffin Canning's uptick in velocity

The second starter to make his team debut this series after Clay Holmes pitched on Opening Day, Canning looked good over his 5.2 innings. The right-hander allowed two runs on four hits, striking out four and walking two, but his last pitch thrown went for an RBI double against Alvarez that was the difference in the game.

Nevertheless, after a spring training where his fastball sat around 93-94 mph, Canning's velocity topped out at 96 mph on Saturday, causing Mendoza to take notice.

"I thought Canning was really good overall," the skipper said. "The slider was good, changeup was good, the velo. I mean when you look at the first couple of innings, the fastball was up to 96 – something that we didn’t see in spring training. And he kept attacking, kept mixing his pitches. I thought overall he had a really good outing."

For Canning, he views the start as a good one to build off of going forward. But if he can prove to be a solid option like he was on Saturday and for all of spring training, the Mets "have something there," Mendoza said.

As for Alvarez, the slugger just got to Canning once again after entering play on Saturday 2-for-6 with a home run against the 28-year-old. Before the double, Alvarez was 0-for-2 on the night.

"I’ve had some tough battles with Yordan so that’s unfortunate to end it that way," Canning said.

Roki Sasaki chose right when he signed with the Dodgers.

Never mind not being ready to lead the rotation of another team and challenge Shohei Ohtani. The 23-year-old Sasaki doesn’t look ready to pitch in the major leagues.

Sasaki made his second start for the Dodgers on Saturday night, and it was somehow worse than his first. He didn’t make it out of the second inning of a 7-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers at Dodger Stadium, his control problems even more pronounced than they were in his debut in Tokyo.

He recorded only five outs. He walked four. He was charged with three hits and two runs. Of the 61 pitches he threw, only 32 were strikes.

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This disheartening start to his major league career — he walked five batters in three innings in his previous start against the Chicago Cubs — shouldn’t sound any alarm bells, but that’s only because he’s playing for the Dodgers.

If Sasaki needs another start or two to get acclimated to the pitch clock or low-quality American baseballs, the Dodgers can afford to give them to him.

If he needs to spend time refining his delivery in the minor leagues, the Dodgers have the necessary depth to cover his absence.

Sasaki won’t have a rookie season like Fernando Valenzuela’s or Dwight Gooden’s, but the Dodgers don’t need him to. The Dodgers are World Series favorites with or without him, and they have the luxury of treating him as if he’s a prospect without compromising their championship ambitions.

His circumstances would be completely different if he’d signed with another team. On the San Diego Padres, he probably would have started the season as the No. 3 starter. Him pitching like this would have erased whatever chance the Padres had of dethroning the Dodgers in the National League West. The pressure to perform would be greater by several orders of magnitude.

However, there is a downside to not being needed, as Sasaki is with the Dodgers, which is that a player can be forgotten. Around this time last year, Bobby Miller was viewed as a star in the making. Miller didn’t have the season the Dodgers envisioned, as his performance declined and his health failed him. He started this season with the franchise’s triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City.

Read more:Moving Teoscar Hernández in lineup pays off for Dodgers in sweeping win over Tigers

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Based on the Dodgers’ original lineup, Teoscar Hernández would have been in the dugout during the biggest at-bat of Saturday night’s game.

Originally, on a night the Dodgers gave normal No. 2 hitter Mookie Betts a scheduled day off following his battle with a stomach virus last week, switch-hitter Tommy Edman was supposed to follow leadoff man Shohei Ohtani in the batting order.

About an hour before first pitch, however, the team announced a late change.

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In the new lineup, Hernández was bumped up to second from the cleanup spot. Edman, who has been a significantly worse hitter from the left side of the plate since joining the Dodgers last year, was dropped to eighth against Detroit Tigers right-hander Reese Olson.

The switch meant that, when the Tigers intentionally walked Ohtani with a runner on third and two outs in the fifth, it was Hernández who came to the plate in what was then a tied ballgame.

Sometimes in baseball, those are the fine margins on which contests can be decided.

On cue, Hernández produced the biggest swing of the Dodgers’ 7-3 win over the Tigers in his pivotal fifth-inning at-bat, lining a two-run double inside the third-base bag to help the Dodgers extend their perfect record to start the season to 5-0 — making them just the fourth defending champion in MLB history to begin their season with five consecutive wins.

“Just kind of thinking through things, I just felt that if you slide Teo up, I felt good about that,” manager Dave Roberts explained. “And it just worked out.”

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Like the four wins that preceded it, the Dodgers’ performance was far from flawless. 

Rookie phenom Roki Sasaki failed to get out of the second inning in his first career Dodger Stadium start, struggling with his command again in a two-run, four-walk, 1 ⅔-inning outing.

The Dodgers’ bats only mustered two early runs off Olson, with Freddie Freeman hitting a solo home run in the first and Andy Pages scoring on Michael Conforto’s double in the second (despite running through a stop sign from third-base coach Dino Ebel and getting bailed out by a wayward throw to the plate).

Then, in the seventh, the Dodgers almost let the Tigers back into the game on two defensive miscues. Hernández dropped a fly ball while crashing into the wall on a running catch attempt, resulting in a leadoff triple. Two batters later, reliever Luis García created more traffic for himself by failing to cover first on a ground ball, albeit after appearing to tweak something on his pitch.

And yet, in what has become an early theme of the team’s title defense this season, the Dodgers nonetheless found a way to pull away late.

Hernández’s double gave them their first lead in the fifth. Will Smith and Edman extended it with solo home runs in each of the next two innings. And despite being called upon for more than seven innings of work, the bullpen posted almost nothing but zeroes the rest of the way, completing the club’s second-straight series sweep to open the season.

“The bullpen did a fantastic job ... and obviously the offense picked us up and scored some runs when we needed to,” Roberts said. “That's a good ball club over there. So for us to win three at home was a huge series for us.”

Like the first two nights of this home-opening series, Saturday began with another (albeit more muted) round of pregame ceremonies. Hernández, Betts and Ohtani were given their Silver Slugger Awards from 2024. One of last year’s postseason heroes for the Dodgers, Tigers pitcher Jack Flaherty, was presented with his World Series ring by a group of his former teammates on the field. The same thing happened back in the clubhouse, with Dodgers players distributing rings to members of their behind-the-scenes staff.

"I think we've been able to compartmentalize,” Freeman said. “It's been a great weekend.”

It didn’t include a great start from Sasaki, though. Just like in his MLB debut in Tokyo last week, when he sprayed the ball around with shotgun-esque command, he put the Dodgers in an early hole amid more command issues.

In the top of the first, Sasaki found the zone on just 24 of 41 pitches, fell behind on five of the eight batters he faced, and gave up two runs on three singles (one of them, a swinging bunt by Manuel Margot that opened the scoring) and two walks (the second, a bases-loaded free pass that forced in another run).

In the second, Roberts pulled him with two outs after Sasaki issued two more walks, giving him nine in less than five total innings.

“Roki, throughout his entire career, he's been a command guy,” Roberts said of the 23-year-old right-hander, who only averaged two walks per nine innings during his four professional seasons in Japan. “Right now it's just not syncing up. So we're going to keep working on it.” 

That work, however, will have to come later.

Roberts then turned to his bullpen, counting on the group to pick up the slack in the same way they did so often in October.

“Those guys are ready for it whenever that happens,” said Smith, who caught six relievers over the next 7 ⅓ innings. “Like they say, they're dawgs down there. We're fortunate to have all of them.”

Indeed, the Tigers’ only other run scored after Hernández’s dropped ball in the seventh.

And by then, the right-field slugger already put the Dodgers in front.

Although Hernández said he didn’t realize he’d been bumped up to No. 2 spot in the batting order until he got to the dugout shortly before the game, he was fully locked in after watching Ohtani get intentionally walked in front of him.

“Any hitter that gets the guy in front of them intentionally walked, you put a little more effort and focus on the things you have to do in that at-bat,” Hernández said. “Just to do damage and help the team.”

This time, Hernández’s damage came in the form of a scorching one-hopper that snuck past Zach McKinstry at third base. Conforto, who led off the inning with a walk, scored easily from third. Ohtani, who was motoring around the bases from first, slid in safely behind him.

It already marked the fourth time this season the Dodgers managed to erase an early deficit.

And, with the help of another insurance run in the eighth — when Freeman’s RBI double scored Ohtani from second following his first stolen base of the season — the unbeaten Dodgers never looked back again.

“To go out there and play a good baseball game, get the sweep in front of our fans, while we celebrate last year,” Freeman said, “I think that was just a great job by all of us this weekend."

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.