ST. LOUIS – This is the crazy flip side to a season graced with wonder and touched by magic. If you are a Mets fan, the first six months of this season were an all-but-unprecedented dream ride, an unchallenged bull rush toward October.
Even the fabled 1986 Mets had a moment of regular-season truth, in this very city in fact. Nobody in April of that year could possibly realize how good the Mets were, or how poor the Cardinals were destined to be; all anyone knew was that the two teams had battled to the season’s final week a year earlier and would likely do the same thing again.
When the Mets pulled into old Busch Stadium on April 24, they had a half-game lead over the Cardinals but had yet to prove to themselves, or to St. Louis, that they could beat the Cards when they absolutely had to. And entering the top of the ninth, the Cardinals led 4-2, had lights-out closer Todd Worrell on the mound, and were prepared to leapfrog the Mets.
Only George Foster led off the ninth with a double, and one out later, Howard Johnson hit a laser beam over the right-field wall to tie the game at 4-4. An inning later, Foster (enjoying what turned out to be his signature game as a Met) drove in the winning run, and three days later the Mets had a four-game sweep and had left the Cardinals for dead. They’d win 108 games that year. The Cardinals would win only 79. It turned out to be no contest.
But at least for those four days in April, it had been.
Twenty years later, the Mets never even had that much of a threat to their season. Oh, they would point to certain series and try and inject some artificial significance – the Braves series in Atlanta in late July, for instance, or the Red Sox series at Fenway, and both Yankees series.
But the fact is, the Mets spent only one day this year – April 5 – out of first place. That came – irony of ironies – after Billy Wagner blew his first save of the season, allowing a late home run to Washington’s Ryan Zimmerman, allowing the Nats to beat the Mets and even their record at 1-1, allowing the Braves to spend their only 24 hours in first place all year at 2-1.
That was it. That was that. From there, the Mets’ status as NL East bullies was only reasonably threatened one time: when the Phillies inched to within a game on May 14.
That was it. That was that.
“This team,” Willie Randolph said the other day, “has done a great job taking care of our business all season long. We’ve been very resilient, very good about doing the things we need to do to make sure we accomplish what we want to accomplish and be where we want to be.”
It’s true. But here is where the flip side arrives: Every other team still playing baseball yesterday was forced to live through at least one serious crisis of confidence during the latter phases of the season. The Athletics had to fight off the Angels. The Tigers had to fight off the White Sox and the Twins and then find a way to slay the pinstriped beast. And the Cardinals seemed intent on wiping the ’64 Phillies out of the record books with what was nearly an 11th-hour collapse for the ages.
They all survived gauntlets of various degrees.
The Mets never did, because the Mets never had to, not even in easing to a first-round sweep over the Dodgers, and for the most part that’s allowed everyone involved – players, fans, executives, everyone – to enjoy the ride in an easy, pressure-free zone.
But the moment So Taguchi launched a 96-mph Billy Wagner pitch over the Nassau County border, that all changed. Suddenly, for the first time all season, this edition of the Mets faces a weekend in the sun and the chill of St. Louis, knowing that it must perform well, that it mustn’t blink, that one ill-timed misstep could undo all that’s come before.
Starting with last night’s Game 3 matchup with the Cardinals, the Mets were officially on the clock for the first time in 2006. All champions eventually face such a moment. Last night, we started to see if the Mets could rise to it. Or shrink away from it.
