CINCINNATI — There were two outs in the sixth inning, and a skinny 2-1 lead on the scoreboard, and the tying run on second base, and a wicked combination of rain, sleet and snow spitting from the sky, and a full if frosty ballpark starting to get loud for the first time all afternoon and, you imagine, an entire segment of Mets fans back home reaching for various combinations of Rolaids, Maalox and Tums.
Johan Santana was out of the game after 99 mostly brilliant pitches, and he certainly would have been forgiven if his first thought was to dissolve his own Alka-Seltzer tablets into some water. He’d seen this movie a lot as a Met. So had Jerry Manuel.
Ten outs?
A year ago, it could take the Mets’ bullpen two weeks to get 10 outs.
“But that,” Manuel said, with half a smile and all the Zen he could muster, “was a year ago.”
Suddenly, everything the Mets had crafted for themselves was right there, right in front of them on the field at Great American Ball Park. Their left-fielder had already hit a home run and driven in both runs — and it wasn’t Manny Ramirez. Their second baseman had socked a double and scored a run — and it wasn’t Orlando Hudson.
So far, two moves the Mets hadn’t made this winter seemed justified. Now it was time to show off the big moves they had.
In came Sean Green, the least celebrated of the new corps. Mets fans know The Formula by heart already: Green, then J.J. Putz, then Frankie Rodriguez. If it doesn’t roll off the tongue like Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance just yet, it is a damn sight more comfortable and comforting than Heilman-to-Schoeneweis-to-Ayala.
“I knew I could be facing a righty in a certain situation,” Green said, “and I knew I had to be ready to pitch my inning. Look, we all know what went on here last year. But it’s not like we talk about it. We’re ready for this year.”
Maybe last year, the line drive Edwin Encarnacion greeted Green with finds a gap or hugs a corner and scores the tying run; this time, it lasered straight into Daniel Murphy’s glove. Maybe last year, the one-out walk Putz surrendered to Chris Dickerson in the eighth comes back to haunt him; this time he responded by whiffing the dangerous Joey Votto and inducing the even more perilous Brandon Phillips to ground out.
And certainly last year, there is no way Rodriguez blazes through the ninth inning 1-2-3, because even when Billy Wagner was healthy last year it sometimes seemed as if 1-2-3 innings had been forbidden by law. Only that is exactly what K-Rod did, dismissing Jay Bruce, Encarnacion and Ramon Hernandez without breaking a sweat (though the 39-degree conditions helped keep everyone dry, too), capping it all with an ultra-filthy change that Hernandez swung at feebly.
“That was very, very satisfying,” Manuel said.
It was better than that, and Manuel conceded as much, because as much as performing the jobs — as Putz put it — “that we’re paid, and paid well, to do,” the three newcomers allowed the Mets, their manager and a legion of followers always fearing the worst to exhale.
It is no small thing; that’s how cataclysmic the bullpen fiasco was last year, how scarring it was. None of the men in question seemed overly bothered by it — K-Rod spending his pregame blissfully listening to salsa, merengue and reggae on his iPod, Putz hoping simply he “wouldn’t slip on the ice” on the way out of the bullpen.
As much as anyone, though, it might be Green who best symbolizes the Old and the New. Because it was the release of one symbol of the Bullpen Follies — Duaner Sanchez — that allowed Green to take his favored number, 50, and discard the 48 he’d started spring with, the one that formerly belonged to Aaron Heilman, the pouting face of all that late-inning carnage.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this: Maybe they’re all just that much better than the guys who used to be here. One game in, it’s hard to argue. There’ll be 161 more for that.
