IN the ninth inning, with hope leaking from every fissure of their doomed ballpark and flooding out of every crevice of their doomed season, there tumbled from the speakers a familiar melody that was designed to inject one last 10cc boost to a flagging baseball team.
“Just a small town girl,” came the recognizable lyric, “livin’ in a lonely world . . . ”
Yes, at the 11th hour, the Mets were turning to Journey, to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” to the song that helped the White Sox end an 88-year drought two years ago and also, not long ago, provided the soundtrack for the very last scene of “The Sopranos.”
Before everything faded to black.
“I’m embarrassed,” David Wright said, and even though he said the words in barely a whisper, they echoed through the funereal Mets clubhouse like feedback through an amplifier. “It’s pretty pathetic that we had the division within our grasp . . . ”
Here’s where the words go even quieter.
“The fans deserve better,” Wright said. “This is on the players.”
The mea culpa was appropriate, of course, and timely, even if the standings insisted it was a few hours premature. Ninety miles away, Cole Hamels was throwing blanks at the same Nationals team that had come into Shea Stadium earlier in the week and torched the Mets’ pitching staff. That game ended 6-0, Phillies. This one ended Marlins 7, Mets 4.
For the first time since May 15, the Mets woke up this morning in second place in the NL East. That is sure to come as a staggering reality for these players, more so for their fans.
Fifty-five thousand of them came to Shea last night, and they tried their best to think happy thoughts, to try and drown out the encroaching blues with ever-louder strains of “Let’s go, Mets!” even as Florida’s Jeremy Hermida made Oliver Perez’s ninth pitch of the game disappear for a 2-0 Marlins lead, even as Perez tied a major league record by hitting three batters in the third, even as one Mets rally after another met empty, awful endings – in what has become two full weeks of empty, awful endings.
“We made our beds, we have to live with it,” manager Willie Randolph said, mixing his metaphors but nailing perfectly the predicament his team finds itself in.
“This is not over yet,” Carlos Beltran said. “It’s not over until the last game of the year.”
The Mets have to feel that way. The fans have to feel that way. It is a natural byproduct when the days dwindle down to a precious few and you’re willing to believe in anything that will make the season last a few days longer, or even a few hours more.
For weeks, ever since the Phillies won the coin flip, Mets fans had roared loudly that they wanted no part of a play-in game at Citizens Bank Park on Monday, and you have to believe the Mets felt precisely the same way. Now they would gladly play the game in the parking lot if it means buying an extra day of baseball season.
First, of course, they need to actually win a baseball game, and then get some help from the Nationals, and the way things have gone the first necessity seems far more improbable than the second. The Mets have lost five in a row at Shea to the dregs of the NL, and seem hell-bent on establishing a permanent place for themselves in baseball’s history books, a place where the word “choke” will forever be tied to their legacy.
Worse, they seem incapable of doing a damn thing about it.
“We know what it’s like to be chased,” Wright said, his voice tangled and tinny with emotion, his glassy eyes a message to Mets fans that some of the Mets really do hurt as much as they do this morning. “Now it’s the Phillies’ turn.”
He meant to try and fend off the chase. But by 7 p.m. tonight, it could mean something else, because by then it really could be the Phillies’ turn – to wave a divisional pennant. And the Mets’ turn to fade to black.