ST. LOUIS – Sometimes, a season can be crystallized so simply, so easily, so succinctly.
The Mets would rather not have had it all come down to this, but that’s where they are, that’s the fix they’re in, and now there is only one way to rectify it before it morphs into an irretrievable mess.
They have to do the one thing they did better this season than they ever have before across 45 seasons of National League baseball.
They have to score in the first inning tonight. They need to get to young Anthony Reyes in a hurry, and they need to put a crooked number on the board, a cushion to make themselves feel better, a lead to make Oliver Perez seem like something less than the sacrificial southpaw he looks for all the world to be.
That, above anything else, was the Mets’ signature formula for success all season. They scored 131 first-inning runs, the most in franchise history. When they were playing at their very best, the Mets seemed to be up 2-0 before you ever settled into your La-Z-Boy, up 3-0 before you ever cracked open your first Coors.
That is what the Mets need in the worst, most desperate way tonight.
They need Jose Reyes to get on base immediately, they need Paul Lo Duca to push him over, then they need the heavy guns to take aim at the gaps and the fences at cozy Busch Stadium.
Early runs are no guarantee for success, of course. If they were, then John Maine would have made the most of the 3-0 lead he was given after one inning of Game 2 of this series, and the 4-2 lead he was staked two after the second inning, and the Mets wouldn’t be knee-deep in quicksand right now.
The Mets could well take a 4-0 lead into the bottom of the first and be staring at an 8-4 deficit before they ever take another hack; that’s how unpredictable a carnival ride Perez expects to be this evening.
But early runs are the only thing that will allow the Mets to steer their listing liner back onto a somewhat manageable track. Get Perez a lead, and hope he can get you five or six innings or reasonably professional work. Then you can go back to that other formula that worked so well this season (before Game 2 anyway), the bullpen.
That was the lone consolation derived from the 5-0 pasting the Cardinals administered the Mets last night, after all. As wretched as Steve Trachsel was even before he was taken out of his misery after taking a Preston Wilson liner off his leg, Darren Oliver was not only splendid, throwing six innings of shutout ball after cleaning up the detritus of Trachsel’s mess, but he and Roberto Hernandez allowed the rest of the bullpen a full night off.
That was going to be a must at some point in this series, with the rain that cancelled Game 1 forcing a five-games-in-fivenights marathon to start the series.
Maine’s adventures in Game 2 required Willie Randolph to drain the bullpen in a futile cause, and it was obvious there were going to have to be nights off administered all around at some point.
Last night, they got one. There was your wheat in an evening filled with chaff.
It seems impossible to believe that it was less than 48 hours ago that the Mets were coming off a feel-good win in Game 1 of this series, that they seemed to be in a higher weight class than the Cardinals, who were muttering to themselves and to the media and seemed generally overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to figure the Mets out.
Now those very same Cardinals stand halfway to a 1968 World Series rematch with the Tigers. And those very same Mets are halfway toward winter, after a summer that promised so much and a fall that has taunted so cruelly. There isn’t a Mets fan alive who will be looking forward to the bottom of the first inning, when Perez will be forced to take aim at David Eckstein, Preston Wilson and a fellow named Pujols still looking for his first NLCS RBI.
In order to make that palatable, the top of the first had better contain some of the Mets’ finest work of the season.
That, or they’d better pray for rain.
