The Mets won their 67th game ever at Turner Field on Sunday, or as reliable sources continue to insist, “They never won there; even if you present me with a list of occasionally stirring Met victories in that ballpark [1], I refuse to acknowledge it.” Mets fans who prefer misery as company (and there are a few) shall forever dwell mentally in Mr. Kenny Rogers [2]’ neighborhood, where unfriendly postal carrier Angel Hernandez is regularly misdelivering the mail, and the local public works department won’t send a crew out to fix that pothole-size strike zone on Maddux Lane no matter how many petitions we sign, and can’t somebody do something about that offensive music they keep playing while encouraging everybody to partake in that equally offensive hand gesture?
Turner Field was a town built on perceptions as much as it was the home of the Braves for twenty years. The perceptions it ingrained in most of us veered to the permanently horrible side of the street, thus the common shorthand, “house of horrors”. Can’t argue with perceptions. You can throw the occasional counterintuitive fact at them, but as we’ve seen in this political season, facts that don’t match preconceived narratives tend to be chewed up without ever being fully digested.
Pleasant to speak of Turner Field in the past tense, though. The Braves still have home games scheduled and the building will be retrofitted for other purposes, but it’s dead to us, providing a rare episode of wish fulfillment. True, the request was filed before the turn of the current century, but these things have to go through channels, and I don’t mean TBS, yet another former home of the Braves [3].
The visitors departed departing Turner Field 10-3 winners [4], taking two of three in their unlikely quest to secure a playoff berth. They are in sole possession of the second National League Wild Card, while Turner Field remains in soul-possession of Satan. The Mets shoved the Braves into the officially eliminated pile, which was an incidental benefit of their romp. The real prize was pushing themselves past the Cardinals and continuing to shadow the Giants.
Despite flubbing the ballgame aspect of Shea Goodbye, the Mets have proven adept at final farewells to other people’s ballparks. They’re on a six-game winning streak where definitive au revoirs are concerned, making the most of their parting encounters at the Ted, Joe Robbie (2011), the renovated version of the original Yankee Stadium (2008), RFK (2007), circular Busch Stadium (2005) and the Big O (2004). Unlike the subsequent last roundups, Olympic Stadium probably deserves an asterisk since it wasn’t officially announced that the Expos were vamoosing to Washington when the Mets played them for the last time in Montreal, but the bilingual writing was on the wall.
When the Mets kissed off Turner predecessor Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on the second Sunday of September 1996, they did it in style as well, defeating the defending world champions, 6-2. Mark Clark [5] bested Greg Maddux [6], with each of their records revising to 13-11. The headline from that September 8 contest was Todd Hundley [7] blasting his 40th homer of the year, setting a new Met single-season standard (Darryl Strawberry [8] twice hit 39) and tying Roy Campanella [9] for the catchers’ power plateau six days before establishing a new mark at Shea. The 9/8/96 memory that stays with me most two decades hence is a conversation between Bob Murphy and Gary Cohen. Murph marveled at how many different streets in Atlanta carry the name Peachtree. Cohen commenced quoting the contemporary Presidents of the United States of America song, “Peaches [10].”
“Millions of peaches, peaches for me,” Gary impishly told Bob. “Millions of peaches, peaches for free.”
“Yes, Georgia is certainly famous for its wonderful peaches,” or something like that was Bob’s response before the next pitch was thrown.
1996 was a long season. 2016, however, has become quite peachy. Seth Lugo [11]’s seven innings of six-hit ball was as sweet and juicy as could have been asked. Yoenis Cespedes [12] crushed the cream out of a bases-loaded pitch from Brave starter Williams Perez [13] to catapult the Mets to a 5-0 lead that made Lugo’s path down Atlanta’s many similarly dubbed thoroughfares a veritable walk in the soon-to-be-vacated park. Cespedes declined to embellish his hitting with insights afterwards. A Mets spokesman told waiting reporters, “His bat will do his talking.”
When asked to clarify, Yoenis’s lumber elaborated, through an interpreter, “OH YEAH!!!!”
Cespedes’s third-inning grand slam gave him the thirty-first 30+ HR season in Mets history, the first since Lucas Duda [14] delivered his thirtieth on the final day of 2014 [15], the first by a righthanded batter since David Wright [16] in 2008, the first by someone whose default position is left field since Cliff Floyd [17] in 2005. Those seasons all took place during the Turner Field era, when nothing good ever happened to the Mets, except for when it did. Like yesterday and this month.