I straggled home from Game Four of the World Series Sunday at 2:00 AM EDT, which in the instant it took me to look up at the clock, became Sunday at 1:00 AM EST.
Standard Time had returned and the Mets were still playing baseball. Not very well on the eve of us gaining our wee small hour, but they were alive. The sun hadn’t officially set on their rapidly dimming postseason yet.
“Think about that,” I thought.
So I did. I thought it was remarkable. I thought it must be unprecedented. Not on the life-affirming side of the calendar, mind you — clocks didn’t used to be sprung ahead until late April, a.k.a. well after Opening Day — but here where autumn inevitably gives way to winter and we are dealt a single extra hour of sleep as scant compensation for being involuntarily shoved into month upon month of darkness. The Mets simply aren’t active when we as a nation fall back.
Except for this one instance, I realized. The date was October 27, 1986, one day after America grimly reclockened itself on the final Sunday of the month, as was the law of the land at the time. Their last moment in Daylight Savings involved a ground ball…trickling… It was a fair ball that got by Buckner. You’ve probably heard of it.
The Mets gave themselves an extra dose of daylight by beating the Red Sox in Game Six of that World Series and earned themselves a Game Seven, their only non-spring Standard Time affair ever, also their final home game of that particular year. With great help from a fellow known as Knight (he who rounded third on that trickling ground ball), it worked out pretty well for them. Ray Knight hit a tiebreaking homer in Game Seven and won the MVP award in recognition of his role in bringing the New York Mets the world championship.
Twenty-nine years later, it was still the most recent world championship the Mets could claim and remained the standard against which all subsequent Mets teams would be measured. No wonder, then, when I peered hard into that clock following Game Four, I saw a glimmer of 1986.
I saw the Mets would be playing their final home game of 2015 in Standard Time. And if they were going to have any chance of winning the current World Series and creating a new standard for future Mets teams to measure up to, they were going to have to rely heavily on a fellow known as the Dark Knight.
Which was perfect, considering it couldn’t have been much darker three hours before Game Five’s first pitch and it couldn’t have been much darker in the minutes that followed the final swings of Game Four.
I was at Citi Field when Daniel Murphy made the boot heard round the world. And Yoenis Cespedes was caught off first. And Tyler Clippard kept missing in agonizing fashion. And Jeurys Familia couldn’t quite slam shut the door marked ROYALS, which was built preternaturally ajar. And the Mets who weren’t Michael Conforto didn’t hit worth a damn anyway.
The team effort that undermined a Series-tying victory until it morphed into a brink-of-elimination loss was breathtaking in its scope and ineptitude. The game I watched get away convinced me there was not much point to getting my hopes up for Game Five. There was not much hope to raise. I had basically none. Thus, after the Mets lost Game Four and I made my quick trip to what was referred to in 1776 as the necessary, I did something I’d never done at Citi Field.
I went back to the stands, somewhere in Promenade. The season was about to end and this was my last in-person game. This was Ultimate Closing Day minus one, but the only version I was going to get. I knew I wasn’t coming back for the actual final home game of 2015. I had to have my moment.
I wasn’t the only one. There were probably more people lingering in Promenade long after Citi Field’s most crushing loss than there were for the playing of the dozens and dozens of ordinary defeats that dotted the Augusts and Septembers that directly preceded 2015. I was surprised security wasn’t bum-rushing everybody the hell out, but the staircases were jammed and the field was still buzzing with media and Royals. There was no need to rush.
There was, instead, a funeral. I conducted it privately, in my head. This was the best season we’d ever had here at Citi Field. It was the only good season to date. Even the crushing Game Four loss contained a faint silver lining. Murphy making that error was the first time I ever felt a genuine kick to the baseball gut — one that truly made me go OOF!!! — in that building. You have to have something on the line to ache that badly over a baseball game.
Congratulations ballpark. You graduated to another level. I shall lower my morale to half-staff in your honor.
I looked around a while. I remembered this or that day or night when things went swell or lousy. I eavesdropped on conversations that were either rich in blame or soberly philosophical. If there was a “we’ll get ’em tomorrow” in the crowd’s remainder, I didn’t hear it. I know I didn’t say it.
It took me until “tomorrow,” in the hours after the clock simultaneously struck two and one, to understand there was a tomorrow to these Mets. Game Five still had to be played. It wasn’t a formality. Not when we had a historically favorable time change on our side. Not when he had a Knight going for us.
As Sunday got going in earnest, I forgot I ever officiated at a private memorial for the 2015 Mets. Whatever life they had left in them was not to be taken lightly.
When it is in condition to be driven, I drive a very old car. It makes sense if you know me. I form attachments to objects animate and otherwise and strive to keep them running for as long as possible. For example, I’ve had the same baseball team since I was six, and it hasn’t always worked perfectly. The car — which has generally been far more dependable than the man who drives it and receives clean bills of health far more often — is undergoing a major repair job that is illogical when one takes into account its age and “value”. Before I signed off on it, my mechanic advised me frankly that this was a lot of trouble to go through to stick with a vehicle whose future isn’t exactly unlimited and maybe, despite its admirable decades of durability, it was time for me to let go.
“Look,” I replied after mulling it over. “I know it’s not going to last forever. But…” I trailed off because I had to grope for the words.
“Not like this…y’know?”
He did. And so did I as Sunday morning passed into afternoon. Not like this. Not down three games to one when it takes four to end the World Series.
No funerals. No memorials. No selling a pennant-winner short for scrap. One more game at home equaled one more chance to win. Win Game Five and have a Game Six. Win Game Six…well, play Game Five. Don’t give up on it before it starts.
So off I went, carless, to root my team on. When I left home to catch the first in a series of trains and taxis that would take me to watch Game Five with my dad, it wasn’t yet six o’clock yet it was already dark out. That was the downside of Standard Time. The upside was all that aforementioned juicy championship precedent I dared to see in the changing of the clocks. Frankly, I preferred it to the margins of Games One, Two and Three shadowing 1986’s. That was getting creepy.
I showed up at my father’s place, which will never be mistaken for McFadden’s, and watched Matt Harvey be Matt Harvey as we understood him to be when we first laid eyes on him. It was as if Scott Boras was never invented. The Royals, those masters of making contact, couldn’t touch him. Harvey was heavenly, striking out nine in eight innings and allowing zero runs. Talk about precedent. He was Johan Santana winning on one good knee and absolutely no bullpen from Game 161 in 2008. He was Curt Schilling keeping the Phillies afloat by shutout in World Series Game Five in 1993. He was anyone you wanted him to be.
He was Matt Harvey. That’s all we ever wanted him to be.
Though we also wanted some runs. Two was “some,” I guess, though as the Dark Knight battled on and the night got later, those two the Mets had totaled looked lonelier and lonelier. It wasn’t a lack of confidence in Harvey to think he would require a little extra cushion. It was recognizing how little the Mets had been scoring as a rule and how capable the Royals were of fast-forwarding their offense on demand and that the entire Met bullpen probably hadn’t been overhauled since Saturday night. No pen’s ever been a certainty, but our pen, particularly in a short series, has always been a crapshoot. Think back to the depth and talent and experience the Mets were packing in relief in 1999 and 2000 and 2006.
You can’t think of it, can you? It was there, but at some very critical juncture, it found a way to crack. That’s what pens do…Met pens, in particular.
Getting Harvey every shred of support as was possible would have diminished a fan’s anxieties. But after eight, Harvey led by the same 2-0 he’d been out in front by since the sixth. The Mets hadn’t done enough to yet another KC starter — Edinson Volquez in this case — and were doing nothing against the Royal bullpen.
But “so what?” you wanted to rhetorically ask. Harvey’s so clutch, so dominant. Can’t Harvey just finish off the Royals with a two-run lead?
Does anybody finish off anybody anymore? Johnny Cueto gave his reliefmates the night off in Game Two, but he was ahead by six and the Mets were, let’s face it, the Mets, at least the Mets of Game Two. The Royals, as much as the “relentless” theme was pounded to dust, truly never relented. Even in the one game they lost in the Series, they were relentless complainers regarding Noah Syndergaard pitching Alcides Escobar up and in.
All of which brought us to the highest drama of Game Five, the emergency board meeting among Harvey, Dan Warthen and Terry Collins aimed at deciding whether Harvey would pitch the ninth. This conversation simply didn’t happen in Jerry Koosman’s day, but baseball has changed forever. No starter throwing impenetrable four-hit ball across eight innings is automatically allowed to attempt to fully craft his masterpiece. Predictably, Warthen was ready to pull Harvey in favor of Familia. Just as predictably, Harvey resisted the pull.
Collins, whose call it was, went with his starter. It was the understandable call. When Harvey walked leadoff batter Lorenzo Cain, it might have been just as understandable if Collins went with his original plan and replaced his ace starter with his ace closer. But he didn’t. He gave Harvey one more batter and, as seems to have been the case through the regular season and postseason, it was one opposing batter too many for one Met pitcher too spent. Eric Hosmer lashed a double to left and Cain — who had Crunchwrapped the Royals’ 648th stolen base of the World Series — raced merrily home from second to halve the Mets’ lead.
It didn’t all have to go to hell from there. It would be disingenuous to insist I knew it would. I’d come a long way from de facto surrender almost 24 hours before and refused to intuitively sense that the Mets were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. How confident was I in the Mets’ ability to win this game that had been moving so swiftly and going so swimmingly? Confident enough in the bottom of the eighth to start checking LIRR timetable apps and gauge if maybe the Sunday night schedule was going to be kind enough to ping me from the North Shore to Jamaica to the South Shore in timely enough fashion to save me a pricey cab ride home.
I’ll take the blame for such an uncharacteristically cocksure gesture (and wound up with another hefty fare in practically the middle of the night). Everything else that went wrong for the Mets can be attributed to the figures on the hospice room television. That would include the Royals, who it must be stressed were the protagonists in this World Series in every way but parochial. We focus on the Mets because we’re Mets fans. The Royals, though, made things happen. They produced. They executed. The Mets, with a few notable exceptions, were mostly reacting to the Royals’ actions. Met defense in particular seemed to be played in the slowest of motion.
Despite now owning the dubious record for most saves blown in a single World Series (3), Familia shouldn’t be inordinately blamed for what was about to transpire. He threw a good pitch that retired Mike Moustakas for the ninth inning’s first out, yet moved Hosmer along to third. And Jeurys really can’t be blamed for Salvador Perez’s neither-fish-nor-fowl grounder to not quite short and not quite third. David Wright opted to field it before it could get to Wilmer Flores (aggressive is good, usually) while Hosmer danced further and further from third.
Wright threw to first. Had to, didn’t he? Had to get an out. Hosmer wasn’t that close to home when David made his peg. Then again, he was getting a little far from third.
Duda makes the putout.
Hosmer breaks for the plate.
Duda turns and fires.
Hosmer’s gonna be out based on geometry. The inning’s gonna be over. The Mets are gonna win, 2-1.
Hosmer’s gonna be safe based on everything you feel in your Mets fan bones. The game is gonna be tied at two.
Hosmer was safe. Duda flung the ball past Travis d’Arnaud and through the window of the Lemon Ice King of Corona. The game was indeed knotted.
The fifth game of the 2015 World Series was over in the twelfth [1] if you’re a stickler for technicalities, but it was basically over when some combination of Familia, Wright, Flores, Duda and d’Arnaud failed to prevent that second Royal run. I told myself otherwise in the moment. In the moment — after I briefly roused my dozing father and half of his sleeping neighbors with the detonation of a phalanx of f-bombs — I rooted mightily for the Mets to walk it off in the bottom of the ninth. I did the same in the bottoms of the tenth and the eleventh. All it would have taken was one incredibly well struck fly ball or a reasonably sturdy chain of Met-friendly events.
But they weren’t coming and I wasn’t surprised, just as it was no shock when the final crack of the year showed in the top of the twelfth and everybody but Buddy Biancalana drove in a Royal run to break the tie and make the score 7-2. The bottom of the twelfth thus ballooned into the most inconsequential final home half-inning in Met postseason history among those that marked closure for a campaign. It wasn’t Mike Piazza taking Mariano Rivera deep to center but not deep enough as the potential tying run. It wasn’t Carlos Beltran taking strike three from Adam Wainwright as the potential winning run. It was Wilmer Flores, folk hero of July, frozen by Wade Davis. If only Flores had swung, it…
It wouldn’t have mattered. The Mets were down by five. Believe, Believe, Believe, yes, of course, always. But when You Gotta Accept, accept that baseball has its new world champion and it’s not the Mets.
The Kansas City Royals are to be congratulated. If you run into one, feel free to congratulate him.
The New York Mets? Our New York Mets? What do we do with them in the hours after they kept us up late for the last time in 2015?
My instinct is to go the route I distinctly recall carving out fifteen years ago under similar difficult circumstances. The 2000 World Series was also a five-game loss. When it ended undesirably, I remember writing and circulating an e-mail of the “buck up” nature. I was so proud of how hard those Mets fought to get as far as they did, never being out of any of their games against the hated crosstown rivals, making us Believe deep into October (albeit before the clocks needed changing). I bought that line a decade-and-a-half ago and I stand by it today.
The 2000 pennant has not aged well in the public Mets fan consciousness, which is a shame. I think one element that is forgotten is 2000 was the culmination of a four-year climb onto baseball’s ultimate stage. We got surprisingly close to the Wild Card in 1997, one game away from it in 1998, two games from the World Series in 1999 and, finally, three games from a world title in 2000. There was a 673-game buildup to Piazza flying out to end Game Five then. It was an exhausting, exhilarating rise, Timo or not.
This run was different. Many of these Mets bubbled under the Hot 100, so to speak, in the years prior to 2015, but the team we’d been making our cause in October didn’t exactly exist until the turn of August. There were great achievements from April to July, yet it’s almost as if they came from another season altogether.
As for how proud these Mets made me during this World Series…I wanna go there, I really do, but the video actualities are just too harsh. Balls thrown away. Balls kicked around. Batters who were rarely hitters. A bullpen that was Russian roulette at its riskiest. This was a thrilling Series only if you were a Royals fan, and that’s not an assessment based on who won. The 2000 World Series was a thrilling World Series, five games notwithstanding. The 1973 World Series was fascinating theater. We lost those, but I knew we competed to the bitter end of both. In 2015, the competition overwhelmed us when it counted most.
I also don’t know if there’s a “the future’s so bright” card to play here. The pitching is fantastic and that’s a spectacular platform on which to build. The everyday lineup…who knows? We didn’t have even a hint of what this one was until the season was about two-thirds over. I’m not up for a full dissection right now, but we know it’s unlikely Cespedes and Murphy are back (and we’re probably unsure how badly we’d want them to stay). We’re enamored of Conforto and feel generally sanguine about d’Arnaud despite his inability to throw anybody out. Everything else is more than a little underknown, whether it’s who’s gonna play where or what they’re capable of giving us in 2016. And that’s fine to a certain extent. Offseasons exist to reshape rosters and we have undeniably entered the offseason.
Honestly, I’m not “worried” about next year right now, but in the realm of trying to figure out if we can take solace in coming close this year as prelude to that which is bigger and better — as Royals fans must have or at least (in hindsight) should have when they lost Game Seven in 2014 — I just don’t know. I remember good, solid clubs and wonderfully appealing stories like the ’93 Phillies and ’07 Rockies warming their Octobers as much as they could and then essentially disappearing from contention after losing the World Series. Same for the 2000 Mets, come to think of it. Because of Harvey, Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom, that’s probably not us. But ya never know.
OK, so the World Series wasn’t a festival of Metropolitan excellence and the crystal ball clouds up if you fog your breath all over it. We led in all five Fall Classic games yet prevailed in just one of them. Our parade is taking an unexpected detour through Western Missouri. What is there to feel good about as Standard Time tightens its grip on our psyches and the sun goes down for good on the 2015 baseball season?
Are you kidding? What isn’t there to feel good about?
It’s November 2. We just finished playing.
We are the champions of the oldest professional baseball league in existence.
We posted our first winning record in seven years, secured our first division title in nine years and, as the t-shirts declare, earned the right to raise our first pennant in fifteen years.
We didn’t passively watch the Giants or Cardinals or whoever represent the senior circuit out there these last five games. That was us, not them, not the Nationals or Dodgers or Cubs. We beat all those clubs.
We outlasted everybody’s expectations, ours included.
We attracted everybody’s attention for the best reasons possible.
We hosted a bandwagon, for goodness sake. Some griped about frontrunners. I welcomed their presence, no matter how ephemeral. This is the idea of winning. You win and you excite the populace. It’s always going to mean more to the diehards. That’s why we’re so named. We take the death of a dream hard, but we are ready to report for duty again and again. This time the dream lived 176 games.
And it wasn’t a dream. It really happened.
We really did win eleven in a row in April.
We really did get Harvey back.
We really did see deGrom blossom.
We really did make room for Syndergaard and Steven Matz.
We really did find a closer, no matter what kind of luck eventually found him, in Familia.
We really did ride Yoenis Cespedes for six stunning weeks.
We really did witness David Wright defeat stenosis, or at least keep it at bay for the two months his entire career had been leading up to.
We really did witness a Murph miracle do in the Dodgers and club the Cubs.
We really did get to cheer countless times and open champagne bottles three times and buy commemorative apparel marking our accomplishments by association and luxuriate in a large lead in our division and withstand a scoring drought in June and persevere to beat St. Louis in eighteen innings and jump up and down when Juan Uribe delivered in late July and how about that kick save and a beauty between Murphy and Carlos Torres and don’t forget the night Bartolo flipped a no-look pass to first and need I remind you we hit eight homers in one night at Philly and we won consecutive 14-9 decisions in Denver and broke a seven-game losing streak in Milwaukee on the strength of deGrom’s pitching and hitting and hair and we applauded loudest when everybody everywhere saw just what a star Jacob really is when he struck out the side in the All-Star Game and we didn’t let that horrible loss to the Padres stop us and we didn’t trade Wilmer Flores and Flores couldn’t have paid us back any better and fuck Chase Utley because we love the stuffing out of Ruben Tejada and though neither of them was on the postseason roster don’t forget that Sunday when Darrell Ceciliani and Dilson Herrera homered in that enormous comeback over the Braves the day after we blew one and there was even a hit or two from John Mayberry at some point and a save from Buddy Carlyle on Opening Day and Alex Torres wore that weird cap and Logan Verrett kept coming through when asked and Kirk Nieuwenheis went deep three times at home after coming back from the Angels and we were no-hit twice and it didn’t matter a whit and Johnny Monell and Eric Campbell and Bobby Parnell a little and Jenrry Mejia for a minute and Duda with the enormous homers in two clinchers and Cespedes with the sleeve and the throw to nail Sean Rodriguez and Murphy stealing that uncovered base and David with the epic fist pump and fuck Scott Boras while we’re at it and two pitchers homered and Ruben hit one inside the park and he will play and hit again but he’ll never do anything better than come out with that cane and Matz’s grandpa cheered nearly as well as East Setauket Steve hit and pitched and…
Ohmigod, what a season and what a postseason and what an experience to be a part of it as a fan and a blogger. What a year to have it confirmed that you don’t give up on the baseball team you form an attachment to when you’re six, no matter how inanimate they can appear for years on end. Not that you were going to give up. It’s just nice when they give you a season full of all this. It’s confirmation that you’re not crazy to be crazy about the Mets. You’re crazy if you’re not crazy about the 2015 Mets.
If this is how it feels after losing the World Series, I can’t wait to see what winning one will mean.
If it means as much to you as co-authoring the most heartfelt Mets blog you’ll ever read means to me, then I will be incredibly happy for you.
Every season since 2005 has played out in these pages, this season a little more so. To every one of you who makes Faith and Fear a regular stop on your trip around the bases; to every one of you who takes the time to burnish what we write with what you write; to every one of you who seeks one or both of us out to extend your thoughts on baseball/life; and to every one of you with whom I’ve been honored to share a championship journey…I’d be at a loss for words to tell you what you mean to me if not for a phrase I’ve found to come in extraordinarily handy over the past month in particular.
Let’s Go Mets.
And thank you.