PHILADELPHIA – You see? That’s all anyone was asking for a year ago. That’s all anyone was looking for. If the Mets could have sprinkled one of those babies into the mix while the sky was falling around their Pumas and their Nikes, then the world would be a lot less of a thermonuclear place for them now.
They’ll take this, of course, no one’s suggesting they won’t. They’ll gladly bring this 6-4 victory over the Phillies at sold-out Citizens Bank Park back to the Westin with them. Maybe they’ll wake up this morning, pick up the newspaper on the other side of their hotel doors, snap it open to the sports page, see the following arithmetic on the baseball page:
Mets 9 6 .600 – –
Marlins 9 7 .563 ½
Yep. The Mets are back in first place again.
“Getting there isn’t a big trick,” Billy Wagner said. “It’s finishing there that’s the important thing.”
Consider that a lesson learned. And consider last night’s victory a message delivered, both to themselves, to the Phillies, and to the rest of the National League. The Mets have become a daily baseball thermometer, their fans taking their temperature daily, hourly, as often as it takes.
The streak is now a good one, four in a row, and if the first three of those were earned at the expense of the downtrodden Nationals, this one came against their sworn enemies, in a ballpark that had lately started to morph into Turner Field on the comparative matrix of houses of horrors, against a pitcher, Cole Hamels, who came into the game with an ERA south of 1.
“In a lot of ways,” David Wright said, “this was a good opportunity to see where we are as a ballclub. It’s early, but it’s an early test, and one we were looking forward to.”
Wright certainly passed. He went 4-for-4, drove in two more runs (he has 17 RBIs, putting him right on a nice early pace to take a whack at Hack Wilson), and showed just how fickle baseball splits can be. Heading into the game, Wright was 1-for-11 (.091) against Hamels, who clearly owned him. Now he’s 5-for-15 (.333), and Hamels obviously has no idea how to get him out.
“Oh, I don’t think you can say anything about any of that,” Wright said, smiling. “I think there’ll be a lot more NL East showdowns between the two of us before all’s said and done.”
Still, when Wright is as locked in as he’s been, the Mets are delighted to have him on their team. They are delighted to have Johan Santana, too, who turned in the kind of jaw-dropping, head-shaking, ace-solidifying game the Mets begged their former No. 1 starter, Tom Glavine, to give them in any of the four games in which he could have saved them across the final 17 games last year. Glavine went 0-for-4 in that task.
Last night, Santana took on the league’s most devastating lineup and gave them two hits and a run over the first seven innings before slamming into the 100-pitch wall in the eighth. He struck out 10 Phillies, and though a flyball pitcher like Santana can be sent straight to therapy after pitching in this matchbox ballpark, he adjusted nicely.
“You just have to tell yourself, you can’t make mistakes against this team, in this ballpark,” Santana said. “If you make a mistake against them they will make you pay for it.”
Chase Utley made Santana pay. Greg Dobbs really made Aaron Heilman pay in the eighth, a three-run bomb that set defibrillators off all over the outer boroughs back home. Maybe last year, the way the Phillies were ingesting pixie dust, the ball that Geoff Jenkins hit next off Heilman would have carried the extra few yards to tie the game.
This time, it died on the track. This time, the Mets added the kind of insurance run that eluded them all across last September. This time, the Mets didn’t hear the kind of joyful din they heard in visiting ballparks in the cruelest hours of 2007, just good old-fashioned boos.
On this kind of night, they sound like a combination of Mozart, Springsteen and Sinatra. The sweetest kind of music. Where was it seven months ago?