One Swing Crushes Mets’ Hopes, Sends Cards to Series
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Last night, Endy Chavez made perhaps the greatest defensive play I have ever seen, and if in the end it didn’t matter, it was no less brilliant for that. It told no less about the team we watched the Mets become over the last week — a very different and far less effortlessly brilliant team than the one that won the pennant, and a more admirable one, a team that survived on nerves and just didn’t, in the end, have quite enough.
Maybe it’s worse having come so close, even putting the tying runs on in the bottom of the ninth with no one out against a rookie closer, and loading the bases against him to bring their great clutch hitter Carlos Beltran to the plate, only to fail — but it was great, great baseball.
The score was tied, 1–1, in the sixth inning, with Jim Edmonds on first base and one out, Scott Rolen at the plate, and Chad Bradford warm in the pen. Willie Randolph sprinted out to the mound to talk to his pitcher, Oliver Perez, the fireballing lefthander who had seemed, before the game, equally likely to throw nine scoreless innings as he was to give up nine runs without retiring a single man. Randolph talked to his man, he talked to catcher Paul Lo Duca, and went back to the dugout. And Rolen, on the first pitch, hit a home run.
It was a no-doubt shot, a searing line drive toward the left field fence, the dead part of the Shea outfield; no cheap home runs are hit there. Rolen, with screws in his damaged shoulder and days removed from a cortisone shot, should not even have been able to reach the pitch, but he did, and it was no less likely than what Chavez did, turning and breaking like a wideout clearing the secondary, hurling himself back with his whole forearm braced over the wall, snaring the ball, hauling it back in, and heaving it back toward first base, off which Edmonds was caught. By the time the out was made at first he had just rounded back past second and what would have been, with Cardinals starter Jeff Suppan’s mastery of a cold Mets lineup, a nearly insurmountable 3–1 lead remained a 1-1 tie.
If Derek Jeter’s Flip against the Athletics years ago was a 10, this was a 12.
Of all people, Perez and Chavez were the last two who were supposed to have saved the Mets’ season, which they almost did. Perez, owner of a 3–13 record this year, came to the Mets in July as part of a minor trade, not only two seasons removed from a campaign in which he’d established himself as one of the game’s most brilliant young pitchers, but so far removed from the pitcher he’d once been that his continued viability as a major leaguer was in question. From mechanics and conditioning to desire and health, nothing about him wasn’t doubted.And Chavez, on his fourth stint with the Mets, was signed as a 25th man — a brilliant defender whose inability to hit much better than Rey Ordonez made him little more than a luxury. Willie Randolph put faith in them, though, and didn’t expose them, and they turned into assets. Down the stretch Perez showed every sign that he could with time become the dominant starter he had once promised to be. Playing every outfield spot and left alone near the bottom of a powerful lineup, Chavez was one of the very best reserve outfielders in the major leagues, working his way on, stealing bases, and playing wonderfully in the field. Still — this?
That’s how it went for the Mets. The vaunted lineup, on which everyone who was paying attention expected they would have to rely to have a prayer of winning this series, completely collapsed, no more so than last night, when they went hitless after the first inning until the ninth.They managed to get none in both with the bases loaded and no outs and later with one on, none out, and Carlos Delgado and David Wright coming up. Instead it was Perez, Chavez, John Maine, Chad Bradford, and even Aaron Heilman — who pitched as brilliantly as we’ve become accustomed to until giving up the last run of the Mets’ season and probably wouldn’t have been in position to give it up if not for Billy Wagner’s meltdown over the last week — who bore the brunt.
There’s no shame in losing, though — there was nothing but honor in the tenacity with which the Mets fought short-handed, and if the offense failed in the end, so it will sometimes happen.
It was a beautiful season, and a series as dramatic as any we’ve seen in many years — and it’s only months until the Mets will take the field again.