WOW!!! The Mets incredible, dramatic, never say die, come-from-behind, do-NOT-hit-a-grand-slam-it-will-just-make-us-angry victory tonight might be the best game I have seen in 10 years. What an amazing ending, what an amazing comeback, what an amazing bullpen...where do you even start??!!
To watch the end of this game was really to witness something special. With LoDuca on first in the bottom of the 9th and the Mets down by 1, Gary Cohen calmly set the stage, saying simply ”Beltran can win this with one swing of the bat”. A 2-count later, Beltran’s bat whipped through the strike zone and bat met ball. You didn’t need to see another thing to know it was gone. There have been a lot of dramatic, walk-off victories this year, ten to be exact, but I have never heard Cohen scream “Its OUTTA HERE” with more passion or seen Willie Randolph smile more broadly than I did tonight. And I was screaming and smiling right along with them.
Not since the magic of ’86 have I been able to look a 7-1 deficit in the eye and feel entirely confident that we were going to win the game. I truly believe it is not cockeyed optimism that has me feeling so bullet-proof, but rather that we are bearing withness to a charmed season. My friend Will, who no one would accuse of misplaced buoyancy, serenely told me when they were down by six, “They come back from games like this all the time.” I didn’t doubt him, or the Mets for a second. In this surreal season, winning games we have no business winning has become a recurring scene.
Aside from the storybook ending, there were a couple of other great story lines tonight, the first of which was Carlos Delgado. After being mired in a horrible, month-long slump in which he has looked entirely overmatched by the lamest of pitchers, Delgado has recently rebounded with a vengeance. Coming into tonight, Delgado had homered in 4 of his last 5 games. Those were prelims for the fireworks tonight. He hit lifetime homer number 399 in the 2nd and then, batting with the bases loaded in the in the 5th, teed off on a hanging Weaver breaking pitch, golfing it about 600 feet from where he stood. It may very well have hit one of the auto body shops across from Shea. I’m not sure. The homer cut a 6-run deficit to 2 and brought the Mets right back into the game. He made #400, which may still be coming down, one to remember.
We also witnessed another phenomenal job turned in by the stellar Met Bullpen tonight. After John Maine’s early-game pitching clinic, things wet horribly wrong for him in the 5th. I have a theory as to why things went south, but I will get to that in a moment. So, as has often been the case this year, the Mets Pen was called into a game in the 6th and asked to pitch 4 innings of “turn of the lights, the kitchen’s closed” baseball. And that just what they did.
Guillermo Mota, the newest uniformed Met acquisition, was the first to take the ball. A former pariah to any self respecting Met fan for his repeated brainings of Mike Piazza, Mota quickly won me over. Looking like a 6 foot 6 inch monster on the mound, Mota mixed 96 mile-per-hour fastballs with a heavy, late-breaking splitter. After giving up a leadoff single, he looked all but untouchable, striking out two hitters and looking dominant in the process.
An inning later, after Pedro Felicaino got squeezed by the ump and walked two batters, Chad Bradford was called on and did what he has done all year long - Walked into a burning building, saved the kids, saved the dog, and left the world a better place than the way he found it. Facing Albert Pujols in the 7th (the same Albert Pujols that had two homers in his pocket already and was looking to break the game open with a hat trick), Bradford induced an inning ending double play. For an encore, he gave
Heilman, who I intend to devote more keystrokes to in the very near future, was lights-out again in the 9th, striking out two and convincing the most ardent, pessimistic dumbass Met fan that he has indeed recaptured his form and his confidence. Heilman, Bradford, Feliciano and Mota gave the Mets 4 innings of no-run, two-hit baseball and set the table for Beltran’s heroics in the 9th. Without this authoritative smackdown of the hot
Now, to get back to my theory about how the game went south in the first place, I will not say my buddy was a jinx-incarnate tonight but consider the facts:
- The Mets are up 1-0 and John Maine is absolutely cruising early, throwing 3 perfect innings and striking out 3.
- My buddy calls. I won’t say his name, but it rhymes with “Jill”.
- Aaron Miles singles breaking up the perfect game
- Chris Duncan doubles
- Pujols hits a 3 run homer to take the lead
- We chat some more
- The cards bat in the 5th – Pujols blasts another homer, this one a grand slam – Mets down 7-1
- I hang up with “sounds-like-Jill”
- Five minutes after hanging up, Delgado belts his dramatic grand slam and the Mets are back in the game
- Wanting to call my pal, I sit on my hands instead. Superstitious much, Pete?
- Carlos Beltran, realizing Pete Korn of
Clearly, only an idiot would maintain that this unnamed friend caused the 2 Pujols homers or that ending the call allowed for the instantaneous comeback that followed. The utter suggestion is preposterous. The black cat that ran across the field before the Cubs’ collapse in ’69 ….sheer coincidence. A random series of events.
Anyway, in a season of comeback-after-comeback, walkoff-after-walkoff, tonight’s win was just an absolute joy. It was the culmination of a great day for all things
