ST. LOUIS All along, they scoffed at the concerns that would visit Port St. Lucie, the skeptic strain and the cocked eyebrows visitors brought with them. It wasn’t just the fact that the Mets lost early and lost often, lost 20 games in all during a haphazard tour of the Grapefruit League. It was more than that.
The corner outfielders both spent most of March looking like they were playing with forks sticking out of their backs. The pitching was covered with more question marks than the Riddler. And whenever a team puts up a carefree, magic-graced season as the Mets did last year, there’s a worry that karma is lurking just around every corner, looking to step on someone’s ankle.
“I’m not worried,” Willie Randolph kept insisting. “I have the kind of team that when the lights get turned on, I know we’re going to be ready.” They were comforting reassurances, sure, but what is a manager going to say, “We’re in big trouble?” Of course Willie thought they’d be ready.
Only, it turns out, they were ready. It turns out, when they flicked the lights on at Busch Stadium last night, when 45,429 red-cloaked, apple-cheeked Midwesterners packed themselves inside and watched them raise a World Championship banner before the very eyes of one of the teams they’d vanquished, the Mets looked as if they were playing a game plucked at random straight from the heart of 2006.
The final was 6-1, and if you are partial to the Mets than this was as satisfying a lid-lifter as you could have possibly wanted to see. You got six strong innings from Tom Glavine, who reduced his personal magic number to nine to join the 300-win club. You got key run-scoring hits from Carlos Delgado (even better: to the opposite-field fence) and Paul Lo Duca (re-seizing the No. 2 slot in the order from David Wright, if only temporarily).
You got a couple of game-sealing defensive gems from Carlos Beltran (making his finest throw as a Met in nailing David Eckstein at the plate in the sixth) and Jose Valentin (a lunging stab that started a rally-killing 4-6-3 in the eighth) to say nothing of a diving catch by Moises Alou, formerly one of the Mets forkified outfielders, and even two hits from Shawn Green (shedding his own utensils for the time being).
None of this can roll the clock back. None of it can change how 2006 ended, the way the 83-win Cardinals pick-pocketed the 97-win Mets and ended their season on the doorstep of a World Series. But it did provided a gratifying beginning for 2007. On a night when the Cardinals raised their title banner, at the start of a week in which the Mets will not only have to witness that but also the ring ceremony tomorrow night, it was something, all right.
And maybe the start of something.
“We’ll watch it,” David Wright said yesterday, speaking of the celebratory festivities that capped a six-month baseball holiday in eastern Missouri. “We’ll watch it all because we’re good sports, and we believe in showing good sportsmanship.”
He smiled.
“And also for motivation,” Wright said. “They have what we want.”
Wright insisted there was no lingering cobwebs haunting the Mets’ dreams or their daydreams as they touched down at the St. Louis airport, as they motored into town, as they unpacked their bags at Busch, most of them setting up shop in the very same lockers they inhabited last October. Wright was in the same one, at the far end of the room, just outside the players’ lounge.
“They beat us fair and square and they should be proud of that,” Willie Randolph said.
The last thing Randolph witnessed before switching boroughs from the Bronx to Queens was Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, the Red Sox capping their forever comeback. By the time the Sox were able to celebrate a year later, at Fenway Park, with the Yankees looking on from the opposing dugout, Randolph was at Shea Stadium far away from the party.
This time, he was front and center, fully returned to the scene of New York’s most recent baseball crime. They all were. Five and a half months later, they all said they’d turned the page. Last night was about proving they were right.
