Sunday night’s awe-inspiring 8-7 comeback victory by the Mets may just be the turning point the club is looking for.
Any devoted fan of the comic strip “Peanuts” knows what’s coming next. The Mets are like Charlie Brown rushing toward the football. Lucy swears she’s going to hold it for them this time, but don’t be surprised if the Amazin’s land flat on their back again.
It doesn’t hurt that their homestand continued last night against NL East doormat Montreal. After this four-game set, though, the Mets won’t play a team with a sub-.500 record until after the All-Star Game.
You’re only as good as your competition, as they say in the schoolyards and barber shops.
“It’s going to be a tough three weeks before the All-Star break,” left fielder Benny Agbayani said. “We just gotta play a little better, and finish up strong.
“We need to play well before the break. We want to go into the second half and make a strong run.”
Met manager Bobby Valentine, who knows his team a little better than the top-of-their-lungs callers on a certain local radio station, thinks turning points are bogus.
Valentine thinks you look back after a run such as the Mets made in 1999, when Al Leiter beat the Yankees in the finale of the three-game Subway Series and kicked off a 40-15 run.
So it’s no surprise Valentine had a very brief pregame chat with the local media, probably preferring to watch Darryl Hamilton take BP than answer endless questions about his team’s emotional temperature.
“I’m glad we came back last night, and I’m glad we’re here today,” was Valentine’s response to a turning point question.
For those who couldn’t stand ESPN’s center-field camera and/or couldn’t stay up past midnight because of employment considerations on Monday morning, here’s a brief synopsis of what transpired in the finale of the Subway Series against the Yanks.
Down five runs in the eighth, the Mets scored six times on an error, hit-by-pitch, broken-bat RBI single, walk, two-run single, RBI fielder’s choice and a two-run blast by Mike Piazza. Not exactly a recipe for success.
We wanted to leave out the part where the Mets trailed 7-2 heading into the eighth because they couldn’t hit a remarkably wild Ted Lilly.
With eight walks, the Yankee starter was all over the map like Charles Kuralt, but the Met hitters couldn’t have found him if they had OnStar installed in their batting helmets. They had one hit off Lilly over 5 1/3 innings.
“This was the best/worst game I’ve ever been a part of,” Todd Zeile said.
You can point to a handful of other so-called turning point games this season. The 11th-inning, 6-5 comeback win over St. Louis on April 28. The Mets were crushed 12-1 the next day.
On May 20, the Mets came back against Los Angeles at Shea to win in the ninth, 6-5. They won five of their next 11 games.
Less than a week ago, the Mets won a 10th-inning game at Baltimore with a similar improbable comeback. They lost the next day, then lost two of three to the world champion Yankees.
One of the problems the Mets have struggled to overcome is a lack of continuity. Valentine has used 62 lineups in the first 69 games because of the injury/jumpstart conundrum.
“When we put this team together, we had 25 guys we think were going to do the job,” Agbayani said. “If one guy goes down, the next one fills in. That’s how it should be.
“We have to have confidence in everyone that goes out every day.”
In lieu of the normal garbage that emanates over the Shea sound system, one of the pregame selections the deejay played was “More Than A Feeling.”
Valentine has a feeling there’s a lot of baseball left, and that his team will begin to play well. It would be nice if the players and assorted fans buy into that theory.