The day had been a grind, a lot like those long stretches of R.A. Dickey’s career when the only one who believed in that right arm was the man attached to it. The Pirates had cuffed him around pretty good, and Dickey and the Mets were lucky to be tied at 3-3 in the bottom of the fifth.
“Watch this,” Dan Warthen said.
They were underneath the field, watching the game on television, retreating for a few beats to breathe deeply and prepare for the sixth inning. David Wright was stepping to the plate, there were two men on base, and Warthen, the Mets’ pitching coach, suddenly shared a premonition.
“They’re gonna try to sneak one by him outside,” Warthen said. “And he’s going to take it out.”
Kevin Correia, the Pirates’ pitcher, tried to sneak one by Wright. Outside.
And Wright took it out. It was a David Wright home run out of 2007 or so, straight out of Shea Stadium, a blast to right field that kept carrying and carrying and would deliver a 6-3 Mets lead when it finally landed beyond the fence. Suddenly what you heard at Citi Field wasn’t the blight of another fallen summer; it was the hope of what the joint could really be some October in the future.
There were 31,506 people inside, a legit number, a good one for a day game on the day after Yom Kippur, and they’d come to propel Dickey to his 20th victory, to try to add a bookend to Johan Santana’s splendid evening of June the first, to knock down a 30-foot putt on the 18th green of a lost round, the one that keeps you coming back for more.
And Dickey could hear them, could hear that noise cascading through the dugout, down the stairs, all the way to the TV where he watched the baseball get gone.
Later, Wright would say: “This is the least we could do for him.”
But now, Dickey knew a couple of things: He’d have to jog up the stairs, greet Wright, thank him for the cushion. He couldn’t disappoint the folks who’d tried to will all of this for him. And he knew he’d have to coax less than his best knuckleball through the next few innings. But that might have been the least of his concerns. He’d been there before. Plenty.
“My hope,” he said later, “always outweighed my doubt.”
Said his manager, Terry Collins: “Lots of people dream it. Few achieve it.”
Collins wanted this as badly as Dickey. He wanted this for the people who’d flocked to the yard, who’d suffered so often across these past few months of dreadful baseball. He wanted his players to honor the atmosphere at Citi, maybe learn from it, thinking: this will be a hell of a fun place to watch October baseball. Someday.
So he told Dickey he would push. Sitting at 111 pitches, he let Dickey hit for himself in the seventh, which yielded a long, loud ovation. He wanted Dickey to pitch until he allowed a baserunner in the eighth, which finally happened when Travis Snider drew a two-out, full-count walk.
Even then, Collins jogged from dugout to mound, the universal signal that a manager can be talked out of going to the bullpen. That wasn’t going to happen here.
“I’m done,” Dickey said, so he would walk off to one final, echoing tribute, he would tip his cap, he would watch Jon Rauch provoke a panic by serving up one long fly ball to Rod Barajas that nearly yielded a two-run homer and one to Alex Presley that did. And then, at last, of course, he would watch a fly ball die in the glove of Mike Baxter, the Whitestone kid who’d saved that Santana gem 119 days before. Six-five, Mets.
Twenty wins for the man with the knuckles.
“I haven’t always had the weaponry to be the best,” Dickey said later, his smile as wide as the Throgs Neck, his legs still rubbery from an afternoon of jangled nerves and surging adrenaline. What he’s always had was a heart that wouldn’t let him leave the arena. The heart knew, long before the arm, that good things were coming.
And then, at last, they were here.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com