Fun While It Lasted

The never-say-die Mets didn't say die until the ninth in the afternoon portion of Sunday's quasi-doubleheader. But their offense failed to come to life in any tangible way until the eighth, so the late-inning heroics effect that proved so popular the day before was kind of dimmed and doomed ahead of time.

It really pays to score four in the first and take your chances from there.

Gosh, Saturday's game was so much fun, making it that much more of a shame that we had to trudge back to our usual humdrum lives so soon again. What, Angel Pagan couldn't have kept the ninth-inning rally going for the power-hitting Anderson Hernandez, he who has the distinction of bopping the Mets' 6,000th home run? (That's 6,000 in franchise history, not in one game — that, as they used to say on Sportscenter, would be a record.) If Hernandez had continued it, how about an encore for David Wright? And what about that bit wherein if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hops?

Yeah, just getting carried away with the ifs here. I tell ya, though, it's been a while since I indulged ifs of the hypothetically hopeful variety. The most ifs I've allowed myself lately have been in the service of ruefully wondering, “If they'd just let the Mets play last 20 games as 180 consecutive innings, could we be done with this season any sooner?” Before Saturday, my patience for Team Unwatchable had completely run out. I watched the unwatchable Mets, but not all that closely. This was no longer the baseball 1962 Mets hitting coach Rogers Hornsby and I stared out the window all winter and waited for. This was just cruel.

M-E-T-S…Must End This Season.

Then came Saturday and all its candy-coated treats. Not just the win in comeback fashion over the Hated Rivals, but the way it was done: David Wright matching his career high in RBI; Fernando Tatis racking up four hits for the first time in ten years; Carlos Beltran resuming his All-Star ways (tell me again how injured players should just pack it in); the chronically ordinary Santos and Murphy contributing to a crucial pre-ninth run that will get lost in the retelling…

Oh, there will be retelling. There will have to be, by our little band of griots. Few will remember this game down the road. You and I, we'll remember it, but that's because we are all sick in the head Metswise. We watch the unwatchable until our patience is stretched as thin as Wilson Valdez. But mass attention was long ago diverted from this Mets team, and not without good reason. Still, you get some fine moments from not so fine Mets teams at junctures like these.

Some get remembered more than others. Perhaps because it slipped into the larger narrative of spoiling the Cubs' Wild Card aspirations, relatively many in our tribe seem to remember the Victor Diaz/Craig Brazell Game from September 25, 2004 (which I find amusing since I couldn't find anybody to take an extra ticket from me that sunny Saturday afternoon). There seems to be general if ever more vague recollection of the Carl Everett Game from September 13, 1997, a much better year but one almost worn down to its nub by the time its most miraculous episode unspooled. Those were games, tied on dramatic two-out ninth-inning homers and won in extras on emphatic long balls — not Lenny Dykstra- or Todd Pratt-caliber situations, but transcendently awesome enough to merit second-tier recall among Metsopotamians of good standing.

But does anybody besides me and my friend Joe, maybe because we were there, remember the Esix Snead Game of September 21, 2002? Does anybody besides me and me alone remember the dizzying spectacle of the Mets beating the Giants 11-9 in San Francisco across twelve stunning innings on August 21, 2004? Or (if I may go way the hell back) the way Joel Youngblood channeled Steve Henderson for a tenth-inning 5-4 win over the Pirates on September 29, 1980?

These were great, great, great games that got no, no, no attention in the pre-blog era. They came when almost nobody was looking, when the Mets were deemed unworthy of coverage or anybody's time. All of 1,787 paid their way into Shea to watch Youngblood swat a two-run homer off Grant Jackson in the bottom of the tenth to rescue Jeff Reardon who had given up the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth. I listened on WMCA, after school, as my mother insisted on my standing still so she could hem some new pair of pants she bought me. I didn't care about pants. I cared about Mets. I may have been one of only 1,787 listening at that point, but I heard every bit of it and I did not stand still.

This is why seasons that fall well short of desired outcome must not, despite my recurring 2009 dismay, end any sooner than they have to. Sometimes amid the muck and mire of Met dregs you get an Esix Snead Game — an Andres Galarraga error brings the tying run home in the ninth, Snead blasts a two-out, three-run walkoff homer in the eleventh — or an afternoon like the one in Phone Company Park five years ago that I still so adore. August 21, 2004 should be a cult classic:

• Bonds on six times without benefit of an intentional walk;

• Wright 4-for-6, three runs scored;

• Floyd drives a homer into the Cove;

• Looper throws three gut-covered innings;

• Zeile skies one into a blinding sun that Dustan Mohr can't handle for the eventual winning runs;

• Jeff Keppinger reaches base for the first time, Wilson Delgado collects three hits and Bartolome Fortunato earns the only save of his big league career.

It was one of those games after which I e-mailed everybody I knew to discover almost none of them had bothered to watch. Pity. The Mets do some of their best work under cover of futility.

That's what they did Saturday when they blew a 4-0 lead and stormed back from an 8-4 deficit to win 10-9 while the “big stories” in sports unfolded on diamonds, gridirons and tennis courts elsewhere. It's not what happened Sunday when they fell down 4-0 and lost 5-4. Nevertheless, John Maine pitched three more innings than we thought we'd see out of him in 2009. Hernandez launched that shocking shot to center (shocking for Citizens Bank even). Josh Thole recorded four hits and Jeff Francoeur strung together three more. Others might take those as signs of encouragement for 2010 (except for Francoeur, whose continued playing and producing in spite of a bad thumb is easily dismissed because he doesn't walk much, so stop enjoying watching him hustle and smile, you unsophisticated ninny). Honestly, I've watched too many Septembers to take anything from them as evidence of what to expect in the years that follow. I'm not all that keen on expectations anymore on the whole. Go find me the season preview that predicted how injured and inept the Mets would become and then I'll put credence in long-term projections.

But at least until Sunday night writes a new storyline, I will appreciate Sunday afternoon's handful of highlights for what they are: a few guys on my baseball team doing well and making me happy for instances all too fleeting as my baseball team's presence on our communal stage dwindles daily. That's about the most I can ask out of September when I absolutely can't ask any more.

Come to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side when we convene our final AMAZIN' TUESDAY of the season — September 15 at 7:00 PM. Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and I welcome special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There will be great pizza, cold beer (the first of which is free if you bring Two Boots owner Phil Hartman a Mets baseball card) and more Met bonhomie than you thought could possibly be scraped together at the end of a year like this.