PORT ST. LUCIE — We don’t think of players like Willie Harris being killers. When we think of Yankees Killers, for instance, we think of Cliff Lee, who always looks as if he’s pitching from Little League distance against them, or Manny Ramirez, who always looked as if he was taking aim at 225-foot fences against them.
Even Mets killers are usually blunt about their murderous intentions. I believe Pat Burrell hit 463 home runs against the Mets when he was a Phillie. What, it was only 36? Well, if you say so … Willie Stargell definitely hit 60 against them for his career. Chipper Jones named his kid Shea, for crying out loud. Dontrelle Willis was 11-3 against them, before he was af flicted with Chuck Knoblauch’s arm.
That’s what killers usually do. They bash you. They baffle you.
Willie Harris? He robs you. Literally. Harris’ thing has been this: He enters the game in the late innings, he brings his glove, and he figures out ways to plunge a knife into the Mets so routinely — and always in Flushing — that you hear the same nervous murmurings through the yard you always do when Chipper steps up with two on and two out.
“Some guys, they don’t want the ball hit to them,” Harris said yesterday morning, smiling, knowing well the angst he has delivered Mets fans. “Me, I want every ball hit to me.”
The smile broadens.
“I like to think of myself as a closer in the outfield,” he said.
He’s a Met now, signed to a minor-league deal, competing for a spot on the Mets’ bench, and this means one of the Mets’ biggest off-season decisions was, quite literally, addition and subtraction.
Memory is a funny thing. It feels like Harris has done the Mets a bad turn seven, eight, 13 times the past few years but in truth, there are really only three or four of them. Harris’ personal favorite: Thursday afternoon, May 15, 2008:
“I remember everything about it,” he said. “We [the Nationals] were up 1-0 in the ninth at Shea. Jon Rauch was on the mound. Carlos Beltran was on first. I’d come into the game to bunt in the eighth (and, in fact, he laid down a beauty, setting up the run). Ryan Church was up. Nobody out. Two-and-one count.”
He looks at you with a wink that says, “Go ahead. Look it up.” I do. He’s 9-for-9, fact-wise.
“He lifts one down the left field line. I get a good jump on the ball but I know I have to get there because if I don’t, Beltran can run, he’s going to score and Church, he’s fast, he may get an inside-the-parker and beat us. I dive, ball’s at my backhand. I have to make the catch.”
The smile broadens.
“I make the catch.”
That wasn’t the most devastating one, though. Harris was with the Braves during another midweek afternoon game — Thursday, Aug. 7, 2007. The Mets entered the ninth trailing 7-3. They scored three times, capped by a David Wright home run. Remember, this was still a time when the Mets were NL bullies, defending division champs, routinely making late-game comebacks, looking then very much the way the Phillies look now. There were 52,425 people expecting magic.
And Carlos Delgado delivered it. He hit a towering blast off Oscar Vilarreal, earmarked for the left-field fence. It was over the fence. And then it wasn’t: Willie Harris pulled it back. Maybe it’s coincidence that from that point on, the Mets finished the season 24-24; what’s as real as acid reflux is the fact they finished exactly one game out of the playoffs.
“Outs are so hard to come by in the major leagues,” Harris said. “If a pitcher knows he can rely on you to deliver them when he absolutely needs one, that’s a big plus.”
And also a big understatement. Especially coming from a killer.