MIAMI – The Mets will return home battered, bruised, bleeding, and unbowed, although you wonder if the people who will fill Shea Stadium across the next seven days and nights can even tolerate solid food now after what their eyes and their stomachs have endured across the last seven.
In a week of bizarre, surreal, and altogether peculiar baseball, a week in which they started to share paragraphs and sentences with the 1964 Phillies, the Mets somehow found a way to escape Dolphins Stadium with a 7-6 victory over the Marlins, with a magic number reduced to five, with a loss-column lead in the NL East bulked up to three.
“Obviously, the baseball gods are making us pay a little bit,” Willie Randolph said when the game was over, almost four full hours after it began. “I told you guys all along it’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to earn it, and that’s what we’re doing.”
In their final road game of the regular season, the Mets beat the Marlins because most of their stars played like stars, and because the ones who didn’t were picked up by the unlikeliest rescue squad possible.
Carlos Delgado, who earlier in the weekend suggested the Mets might have spent much of the season playing “bored” baseball, hit a majestic three-run home run. Moises Alou, looking like the smartest offseason addition of Omar Minaya’s life, had two more hits, broke the Mets’ team hitting streak record, and gunned out a runner at home plate. David Wright drove in the winning run; Jose Reyes scored it.
Scrappy teams are nice. Star-studded teams are better. It’s taken a while for the Mets to embrace this, to put a product on the field as strong as the one on paper. Yet even when Billy Wagner faltered on his return from back spasms, Dan Uggla hitting a ninth-inning, game-tying home run that landed in Pensacola, he was backed up by – are you ready for this? – Aaron Sele and Scott Schoeneweis.
“It’s that time of the year and a win is a win,” Randolph said. “This game was a whole smorgasbord of things like that. But the bottom line is we got that W.”
So the Mets ended the road trip 4-3, when it seemed they might well end it in pennant-race purgatory. They staved off a grim greeting from their fans tonight at Shea, and you know how nervous an asylum that would’ve been if this had ended differently.
And yet … it’s impossible not to wonder how many more of these games the Mets can absorb before they simply suffer a bad case of spontaneous combustion, before they simply disappear before our eyes and fade off into the dust.
The Mets were life and death with a Florida Marlins team that only seems partially interested in playing out its schedule. They were life and death with them after holding a 6-3 lead in the eighth inning, with the score from Washington, D.C. – Nationals 5, Phillies 3 – already posted.
They were life and death because Aaron Heilman was terrible in the eighth inning one day after he was asked to pitch the ninth inning of a blowout. They were life and death because Wagner couldn’t keep Uggla in the ballpark.
And they were life and death because for the fourth time on this seven-game road trip they tried their level best to give away a game they led handily against teams with nothing – zero – to play for, in front of an empathetic crowd in an empty building.
The fact that they survived is a testament to how bad the Marlins are, and how much talent the Mets have. And even in their winning rally, the Mets tried mightily to sabotage themselves, scoring only once despite having a second man on third with a run already in and nobody out.
That they were rescued by two of the most maligned members of their roster – Sele and Schoeneweis have spent most of the year adjoining Guillermo Mota on the Unholy Trinity for Mets fans – is just a reminder of the vagaries of the sport, even now. Saturday, Willie Randolph had said, “every win at this time of the year feels like three.”
In the 11th, it seemed every out felt like six.
“We knocked another day off the schedule,” Willie Randolph said. Soon enough, that won’t be enough. For one day, it was.