WASHINGTON – The sky isn’t falling; the sky has fallen. It lies in pieces on the floor of the Mets’ clubhouse, on the steps of their dugout, the shards mingling with the tatters of a season that once looked so promising, so hopeful, so dappled with destiny. And now sits square on the edge of the abyss.
The Mets aren’t just collapsing, they are in a complete free fall, a hard-to-believe, harder-to-watch meltdown that threatens to make all the good feelings and all the positive karma accumulated across the past two years seem like a feeble, fraudulent tease.
“If I told you I’m not worried,” said Moises Alou, the one Met who has continued to play with springtime ease even as the autumn angst has grown suffocating, “I would be lying.”
This time, the final score was 9-8, and this time they didn’t bother to merely throw away a four-run lead, the way they did here Monday night. This time they blew three four-run leads. Some of the Mets felt good about the two-out rally they staged in the ninth inning. Those Mets are kidding themselves. There is nothing to feel good about when you are so thoroughly smoked by a team that played its last meaningful game before Easter.
“I actually feel very comfortable,” Willie Randolph said before the game, smiling at the swelling ranks of media who’d taken the Shattered Sky Shuttle into town to see for themselves just how quickly a baseball team’s world can be sent spinning sideways. “This is very normal to me. This is what championship baseball is.”
Five hours later, in a quiet office where the only sound was the beep-beep-beep of a computer that sounded eerily (and appropriately) like a ventilator in an ICU, Randolph tried to maintain his optimism.
“When we’re sipping a little champagne in a little while,” Randolph said, “this will all seem like a long time ago.”
He has to feel that way, of course, because if he felt any other way he’d be as good as handing in a letter of resignation. His de facto captain, David Wright, feels that way, saying, “I was really proud of the way our offense and our defense bounced back today. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we win a game like this.”
This time, they gave John Maine more run support than he could possibly have prayed for, and it wasn’t enough.
“If I would have done my job, we would be having a different conversation,” said Maine, a stand-up pro even in the hour of his worst professional misery. “But I didn’t do my job.”
The question no longer seems to be if the Mets can right themselves, but if they’ll ever win another baseball game again. Think that’s an exaggeration? During the current five-game losing streak that’s lit a match to the Mets, they’ve blown multiple-run leads in four of them.
If they wind up turning the lights out prematurely on this season, however, this may well be the game that will keep a legion of Mets fans awake all autumn and well into the winter, because this is the kind of routine game contending teams are supposed to shove in their back pockets.
It was 4-0 after one, 5-1 after 21/2, 7-3 heading into the bottom of the fifth, which began with Maine working on fumes and culminated with Ronnie Belliard, one of the co-conspirators in the Cardinals’ October heist last year, blasting one all the way to the Jefferson Memorial. There were 19,966 people at RFK Stadium, and for a while it seemed 18,000 of them were Mets fans. The rest of the time, it was as if they weren’t even there. They’d died out. Just like their baseball team.
Just six days ago the Mets awoke with a seven-game lead in the National League East, saw the Phillies fall behind the Rockies 3-0 in the first inning that night with a chance to completely dive off the cliff. Now they are the ones standing on the jagged rocks, their toes curled on the stone.
No team has ever blown a seven-game lead with 17 games to play. The Mets left RFK last night allowing the 2007 Phillies to dream of finally avenging their 1964 ancestors.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?