By the end, by the time Francisco Rodriguez zipped one last baseball that looked the size of a golf ball past Jayson Werth, it was difficult to tell which of the teams on the turf at Citi Field was renowned for its swagger and which was infamous for its stagger.
Out of the first-base dugout poured the Mets, charging the mound to congratulate Rodriguez and to celebrate themselves, this series, this most remarkable baseball week. Trudging toward the third-base dugout went the Phillies, who played 27 innings at Citi Field this week and failed to score a run in any of them.
“It was the most amazing series I’ve ever been a part of,” Jeff Francoeur marveled late on, as the Mets hurried to catch a late flight to Milwaukee, all of them savoring this 3-0 win over their most bitter foe, reveling in a three-game sweep in which the Mets whitewashed the Phillies 16-0, enjoying a home stand in which they played six games against the teams who played in last year’s World Series and won five of them.
“And it’s not like we eked out the wins,” Francoeur said.
Suddenly, there is the hope of a summer at Citi Field. At the very least, there is a different conversation surrounding this team now. Talk of a new manager has been replaced by talk of a new spirit, a new identity.
Citi Field has become a genuine house of horrors for opponents, the Mets now 19-9 here, and the Mets themselves clearly possess a resilient streak that’d been missing too long from their DNA.
A week ago, they lost game one of the Subway Series to the Yankees in a fashion that felt far too familiar, a ruinous error coupled with a timely hit by the least likely name in the Yankees’ batting order. The loss left them three games under .500, and the biggest question seemed to be whether Jerry Manuel would be gone on the off day between series or if they’d wait until the Phillies were through with them.
“But then,” Manuel said, “we started pitching.”
Actually, they’d already started pitching. On the homestand, Mets starters allowed exactly one run in six games. In the Phillies series, everyone else got into the act, and by the end the Phillies couldn’t run to the airport fast enough to get away from Citi Field.
Even the most rabid Mets fan knows that the Phillies aren’t going to look like this forever. But it was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted.
“I’ll be honest,” Francoeur said. “By the end, we all wanted the shutout.”
Now the Mets have to re-prove themselves, because at some point they are going to have to learn how to win away from these spacious grounds. There’s plenty of magic to be mined here, but if they’re going to keep the window of opportunity from slamming on their fingers they have to start winning in places like Milwaukee and San Diego, too.
They’ve already done the remarkable, slicing five games off the Phillies’ lead in five days. They’ve already done the near impossible, reducing last year’s pennant winners to dust at a time when it seemed their own season was already in ashes. Now they must merely prove they aren’t simply figments of hope and a quirky ballyard.
“We have to take a little of the magic with us,” Francoeur laughed.
If they do, then we really may have some kind of summer on our hands on both sides of the Triboro. The Yankees may be leaking oil, but they get a batch of winnable games now, most of them at home.
The Mets? If they can replicate what we’ve seen the past week — and the past 22 games at home, in which they’re 17-5 — then maybe the people will keep coming back. And maybe the Mets will figure out a way to bring Cliff Lee here. And maybe . . .
Well, there’s still a lot of season left, a lot of maybes. But the last five games have given the Mets something nobody ever could have reasonably believed they’d get even a week ago.
They get a crack at a summer. They get a crack at a pennant race. They are a baseball team again, and not a traveling circus. It’s up to them how long it stays that way.