MAYBE you had to be at Shea Stadium to understand the helplessness that invaded the place, to recognize that the people in the mezzanine and the loge who were left by the bottom of the seventh last night were beyond angry, beyond disgusted, too exhausted to even boo any longer.
They had advanced rapidly through the steps of grieving all the way to acceptance. That was what you heard when a 28-year-old nobody named Micah Hoffpauir blasted the first pitch he saw from Ricardo Rincon, breaking a 3-3 tie and breaking Shea’s spirit with one mighty swat of his bat.
There’s only so much a fan can take, after all. There are only so many nights they can endure like the one they endured Wednesday – all those runners stranded in scoring position, all that wasted momentum, all those sleepless hours spent rehashing and rewinding all of it.
“I know what the fans felt,” Pedro Martinez said, “because I was feeling it, too.”
Martinez had given the folks one last glimpse of the oversized heart that fuels his undersized body, had given them six-plus innings and 99 pitches, done what he could to keep the Cubs lineup in check, even if that lineup resembled a spring training “B” game.
But one pitch after he left, as he watched quietly from the dugout, Hoffpauir – who had five hits and five RBIs while filling in for Derrek Lee – launched a bottle rocket through the raindrops and through the Mets’ collective heart. The Cubs led 6-3. To that point, the Mets had won 87 games on the season, and in only one of them had they trailed by as many as three runs.
“We were out of options,” Jerry Manuel said. “There wasn’t a lot to talk about. We had to win this ballgame.”
Up in Milwaukee, the Brewers were enduring their own life-and-death struggle with the Pirates, casting their own wary glances at the out-of-town scoreboard. But the Mets are past the point of relying on the kindness of strangers. They need to win games. They needed to win this game.
So they got one back in the seventh thanks to Robinson Cancel – emergency starter at catcher – who led off with a double and scored on a groundout. They were four outs away from the abyss after a Carlos Delgado double play made it two outs, none on in the eighth.
Then they strung together the most improbable rally of the season, the two-out RBIs coming from Cancel and from Ramon Martinez, who has dropped from the sky at the 11th hour of the season wearing a hero’s wreath instead of a cap.
And the tying run scored because Ryan Church – how else do you put this? – knew he had to score. He chugged around third on Cancel’s hit, he was in big trouble – “I was a sitting duck, a dead duck,” he said, pitching for an AFLAC ad – and then he somehow avoided Koyie Hill’s tag, somehow missed the plate on his first pass by, then somehow slammed it with his right hand an eyeblink before Hill tagged him.
“It was an incredible effort,” said Carlos Beltran, who was among the first to mob Church when he arrived in the dugout. “The kind of effort you need if you’re going to fight for the playoffs.”
Church had been scuffling lately, looking slow with his bat, the final indignity in a season that’s been a struggle since the spring. It had been so long since he had been in the middle of something this big.
“Only three days left,” he said, “so what’s the point in leaving anything in the tank?”
Beltran agreed. He wanted no part of extra innings, since he had seen what extra innings could bring on Wednesday. His line drive off Hoffpauir’s glove scored Jose Reyes with the winning run in the ninth and lifted the shroud that had covered Shea like an inflatable dome for so many days.
Less than an hour later, Ryan Braun would send a similarly tense crowd at Miller Park into a similar frenzy by hitting a walk-off grand slam for the Brewers, and even that seemed right. These two teams who’ve been tabbed chokers and gaggers both went to bed last night feeling altogether differently about themselves.
Good. Three days left. What’s the point in leaving anything in the tank?