It’s the sort of moment every player dreams about from Little League, and the kind of situation for which the Mets brought Mike Piazza to New York; down a run in the bottom of the ninth, with the best closer in the league on the mound and the crowd on its feet.
Armando Benitez had blown an eighth-inning lead, and the Mets seemed destined for a fourth straight loss. But Piazza turned destiny around with one swing of his bat last night – a game-winning, two-run home run into the Met bullpen for an Amazin’ 4-3 win over San Diego.
Piazza’s teammates erupted from their dugout even before Piazza had rounded third. They mobbed him at the plate and ripped his shirt, and the crowd of 22,581 that had booed Benitez so vehemently now cheered Piazza and urged him from the dugout for a curtain call.
He eventually obliged, and why not? His high, arcing shot 386 feet off of the Padres’ Trevor Hoffman (0-2) lifted the Mets to a perfect 5-0 in one-run nailbiters, and could serve to jump-start a team that was sorely in need of some life.
“It’s a great feeling. You go deaf from the crowd. You can’t describe it. The crowd goes electric, and to see your teammates [waiting at the plate], it’s just a thrill,” Piazza said. “They tore my shirt off, they were mobbing me. I think there was a lot of tension released. We were a little frustrated. Sometimes you need days like this.”
How badly did the Mets need this? The sight of Piazza leaving the dugout and planting a big kiss on the barrel of his bat told the whole story.
Piazza’s shot made a winner of Turk Wendell (1-0), and was the Padres’ first loss when leading after eight innings since July 24, 1996. San Diego had won 181 straight games when taking a lead into the ninth, and the way Piazza and the Mets had hit of late, that streak seemed safe.
He had been just 1-for-12 since coming off the disabled list Sunday in Chicago, and had admittedly taken some ugly swings. Several came last night, when the Mets left a dozen runners on base – including the bases loaded in the fourth and sixth innings. But Piazza turned all that around, just as quickly as he turned around Hoffman’s first-pitch fastball.
“It’s coming back,” Piazza said of his stroke. “You gotta trust it. It hasn’t let me down too often. You just gotta trust yourself. Sometimes it just takes one guy to lift the weight off everybody’s shoulders.”
He sure lifted a heavy weight from Benitez’, who nullified Leiter’s seven-inning, one-run, six-strikeout performance by giving up RBI doubles in the eighth to Tony Gwynn and Phil Nevin.
Through seven innings, Leiter had outdone Sterling Hitchcock in a pitching duel of former Yankee lefties. The Padres had taken a first-inning lead on Nevin’s RBI double to center, but the Mets tied the score in the first on John Olerud’s solo shot into the Met bullpen, and added another on Edgardo Alfonzo’s RBI double in the fourth.
But the Mets ended that inning with the bases loaded when Rey Ordonez grounded into a double play. Still, Leiter seemed to be smelling a victory, and had more than settled in and was in the midst of tossing six straight scoreless innings.
Leiter was helped when Olerud used every millimeter of his 6-foot-5 frame to leap and snare a Reggie Sanders line drive, then double Quilvio Veras off first in the sixth. Then, after failing to help his own cause by striking out looking with the bases loaded in the sixth, Leiter faced his stiffest test in the top of the seventh.
With Wally Joyner on third and Dave Magadan on second and just one out, Leiter reached back and fanned Damian Jackson with shoulder-high heat on his 112th pitch of the night. Then he retired pinch-hitter Eric Owens on a weak groundout to second to end the inning.
Benitez couldn’t hold the lead, but Olerud singled to lead off the ninth and Piazza took care of the rest.
