Terry Collins knew he was going to get some company. The Mets’ manager had sequestered himself in the video room a few steps down the hallway from the home team clubhouse, around the corner from his office, exiled there after arguing a call with umpire Adrian Johnson in the sixth.
Now it was the bottom of the ninth, and now he could hear the commotion bleeding through the walls, the customary greeting when the bullpen doors swing open and Mariano Rivera jogs into a ballgame.
“You know,” Collins said, to both no one and to everyone who entered the room, “he’s going to throw strikes.”
For so long, this endless night seemed to encapsulate all the Mets’ miseries, both mini and meta, that have stalked them all across the season’s first 49 games. Matt Harvey had been his typically brilliant self, struck out 10 Yankees in eight innings, and left losing 1-0 because he happened to leave a change-up to Lyle Overbay higher than he wanted, and Overbay cashed an RBI single.
The lineup? One more night, one more game, Collins essentially played 52-pickup with the names, let them fall where they may, tried to squeeze blood out of a stone-cold batting order. Ike Davis? Flummoxed, again, alternating haplessness and hopelessness. Ruben Tejada? Another night when you wonder if he’s ever going to keep his head in a game for a full nine innings.
Now here came Rivera. At the start of the night he’d thrown out a ceremonial first pitch, and that had rubbed a few Mets fans the wrong way, even though the Yankees have saluted similarly iconic foes through the years (notably Cal Ripken, given the same honor 12 years ago). Now he was hoping to unceremoniously throw 12 or 14 more, close the door, get the Yankees to the Triboro with a split of the Flushing portion of this series.
Except a funny thing happened. Three of them.
“Sometimes,” Collins would say, “all you need is a stinkin’ single.”
It started with a double, actually, off the bat of Daniel Murphy, who earlier in the night had been mugged for a second straight game by Brett Gardner’s ode to Tommie Agee. Then a dunk single from David Wright, an errant throw, a broken-bat single from Lucas Duda, of all people, and suddenly you had a 2-1 Mets win, the most unexpected celebration in Queens since Sammy Davis kissed Archie Bunker.
“I think we surprised ourselves,” Wright admitted with a laugh.
One game doesn’t erase the 48 that came before, doesn’t brighten the tasks that lay ahead in the 113 to come, but for a night the Mets could honestly feel like they’d taken a bite out of the baseball Apple again. There are still so many nights when the outs come as easily as the Times’ Monday crossword, still so many times you hold your breath when a ball approaches a Mets fielder.
And every Harvey start seems to bring equal parts anticipation and excitement, frustration and exasperation. He is as close to must-see as the sport allows in this city, and yet he now has six no-decisions to go along with five wins, mostly because the Mets never seem to score enough for him, mostly because they never seem to score enough runs on any day that ends with “y.”
This is a familiar slog for Mets fans of a certain vintage, of course, and it’s probably fitting that since we link Harvey to Tom Seaver for everything else, it’s worthwhile to present this statistic for you: In 143 of the 395 games that Seaver started for the Mets during 11 full seasons and portions of a 12th, the Mets scored two or fewer runs in back of him.
Think about that. Thirty-six percent of the time, Seaver needed to be damn close to perfect to have a shot at winning. And amazingly, 58 percent of the time the Mets did just that. It was a lament that languished as long as Seaver did as a Met, and it now follows Harvey start to start, outing to outing.
“At the end, when we’re running out on the field and celebrating, and all that matters is that we won the game,” Harvey said, hinting that he may be the least frustrated of all, at least for now. “Games like this are what it’s all about.”
For a night, at least, it was plenty OK for the men in this room to feel good about themselves. Sometimes all you need is a stinkin’ single.