“There is definitely some badblood from this series. When youwin four in a row, you get a littlecocky. The problem is they’ve got tocome to our place now.”
– Backup catcher Todd Pratt onMay 4 after the Giants swept afour-game series from the Mets atPac Bell, which included two nearfights between the two teams, mostnotably one pitting Dennis Cookvs. Marvin Benard.
HOUSTON – The Giants come to Shea tonight to renew this battle, which has added importance because, even though San Francisco currently leads the West, it is one of the teams the Mets are, er, fighting for the wild card.
“We need to knock them out,” Pratt said heading into tonight. “They kind of embarrassed us at their park in the four-game series.
“I’m sure tensions are going to be high because of what went down with us getting swept there.”
The Mets lead the wild card by 4½ games over the Diamondbacks. The Mets own nearly the same record as the Giants. The Mets are 66-47. The Giants are 64-48.
The biggest memory from the May series, which featured two bench-clearings, but no punches, is of Benard and Cook in the final game, a 7-2 Mets loss.
With men on second and third and Barry Bonds on deck in the eighth inning of a 2-2 game Cook hit Benard on the side on an 0-1 pitch. Both men agreed after that Cook didn’t try to hit Benard, but Benard glared at Cook anyway.
“It hurt, so I let him know it,” Benard said at the time. “I didn’t appreciate it. I think I had the right to glare.”
This caused Cook to explode, trying to get at Benard three separate times, which induced both benches to clear. No punches were thrown, just insults.
The 6-foot-3 Cook, who was removed after he balked and threw just two pitches, exited the mound yelling and calling the 5-foot-8 Benard a “midget”. Cook tried to get at Benard as Benard stood on first base.
“I don’t read anything into it,” Cook said about facing Benard this weekend. “That will be an absolute non-factor. I’ll just try and get him out.”
It was the second play that series Benard was involved in that the Mets had a problem with. Earlier in the series, Benard scored from second on a Jeff Kent single. Pratt, who was the catcher that night, thought that Benard was trying to get a cheap shot in on him when there was no play.
“The ridiculous route Benard took to try to hit me that one game,” said Pratt, who was also in the midst of a bench clear with no punches in the first game of the series when he took offense to J.T. Snow upending the catcher to prevent a double-play attempt. “As I said after the J.T. Snow thing, after further review, it was clean. That was just more at the heat of the moment.
“But when Marvin came after me the next day that was ridiculous. I think a few of our other players found that out. So I wasn’t the only one mad about him.”
Pratt agreed with Cook’s assessment that the Mets must focus on the bigger task this weekend – beating the Giants and not just Friday Night Fights.
“We can’t really concentrate on that,” Pratt said. “If I get to play, I won’t be concentrating on Marvin or anything like that. I will be concentrating on the game. That’s most important, but I’d like to see Marvin go hitless.”
