IT WAS 9:58 p.m. on what could have been the last night of the Mets season when Willie Randolph emerged from the dugout and the onset of what would in seconds be a goose-bump-inducing standing ovation began.
A thankful Shea throng rose to salute the throw-in to the Kris Benson deal, to pay a rousing, throaty thanks to a man only present in a Met uniform for NLCS Game 6 because Anna Benson couldn’t keep enough clothes on or her mouth shut.
The Mets are around to fight in Game 7 because John Maine had the kind of night that puts him in good graces with the Flushing faithful for roughly, well, forever. He gave the Mets length, when that was direly needed. He gave the Mets excellence when nothing less could be tolerated in competition against Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter. He gave the Mets life.
“He had the poise of a Hall-of-Famer,” Shawn Green said of Maine, who supplied 5 shutout innings to provide the backbone of a nail-chewing 4-2 victory that sets up a winner-take-the-pennant event tonight.
By getting 16 outs, Maine kept the workload light on the bullpen, which was vital. The untrustworthy Oliver Perez starts on three-days’ rest in Game 7. But every Met reliever plus Tom Glavine is available to offer support.
Thus, you can trace the Mets’ presence in Game 7 all the way back to a low-cut Christmas outfit. That was the last thread in Met management’s disgusted eyes in the inappropriate acts of Mrs. Benson, showing up at a team charity function scantily clad as Mrs. Claus. The Mets traded her husband to Baltimore and took a flyer on a hard-throwing-but-erratic reliever named Jorge Julio. It seemed that Maine was nothing more than another name to balance out the trade.
But GM Omar Minaya insisted from the outset that Maine was no throw-in, despite appearances. He liked Maine’s minor-league numbers and liked the glowing report filed by one of his most trusted aides, Bryan Lambe. Minaya saw a “Mariano Rivera fastball. It is in the zone and then skips on by you.” He thought Maine, by himself, would provide more benefits than Benson over the next five years, especially after factoring in the cost.
Nevertheless, Maine was roughly 10th among rotation considerations in spring training. “He threw in a lot of B-games in Vero Beach and the reports weren’t very good,” Randolph remembered. “But Omar kept telling me he saw something in him.”
Minaya turned out to be correct. Maine was an asset during the season as the rotation was beset by injuries, and a season-saver last night when nothing less than excellence would do.
He went from “not even on the depth chart,” as Billy Wagner remembers it, to beating the defending NL Cy Young winner in a must-game for the Mets. “It’s a huge journey for him and a huge journey for us,” Glavine said. “But that is the story of our team this year, a lot of guys you didn’t think would do much in spring training have been big pieces of the team.”
The Mets desperately needed Maine to avoid taking himself and the 56,334 anxious souls at Shea out of the game early. And there was crisis in the first inning, second and third, one out. It was a moment the Shea crowd could have gone more negative than a New Jersey senatorial ad. But Maine struck out Jim Edmonds with a delectable changeup, hit Juan Encarnacion to load the bases and induced Scott Rolen to a fly out.
Maine did not allow another hit. He walked four, but held the Cardinals without a hit in their final seven at-bats with men on base. That was the foundation to help the Mets survive to play a game tonight that determines their next destination: Motown or go home. The World Series is still possible because Anna Benson confused a charity event at Shea with Scores. Maine was the throw-in to make Kris and his wife go away.
But at 9:58 last night, a wave of high-decibel applause from the Shea fans told everyone he was a lot more than that. He was the Maine man.