I had the feeling I was seeing something I hadn’t witnessed before, so I ran through it in my head to confirm. Eleven postseasons. Twenty postseason rounds. Ninety-four postseason games. It took until the respective eleventh, twentieth and ninety-fourth of the above for the New York Mets to do something they’d never done before. Never before had the Mets been as few as six outs from clinching in a playoff situation without, in fact, clinching.
Not the history we were seeking Wednesday night in Milwaukee.
A Wild Card Series sweep was close enough to taste, distant enough that you couldn’t really get a grip on the fork you wished to use for the tasting. Yes, we were up a run with two defensive innings to go. No, it wasn’t a case of fait accompli interruptus. Six outs against a ballclub like the Brewers is simply too many to count down if you’re planning to drape plastic sheeting over the clubhouse stalls with confidence. The first three outs the Mets had to get ended up intertwined with three Brewer runs. There wouldn’t be anymore defensive outs after that.
Oh, that eighth inning. Oof. Honestly, though, you could say “oof” to a good bit of Game Two before Phil Maton gave up the two home runs that turned the tide for, one hopes, one night and not the entire series. “Oof” watching Sean Manaea struggle a little more than usual through five (though his bottom line of just two runs wasn’t too bad). “Oof” watching Pete Alonso tangle his feet in his bat as he sought to beat out a potential double play, which seemed possible on this particular first-inning, one-out grounder — with Mark Vientos on third — until Pete failed to appear in our picture. The Polar Bear hit the ball, dropped his lumber, tripped over it, and so much for dashing down the line in time for Vientos to score. The Mets had put one on the board. More right away would have been nice.
“Oof” repeated itself often, as the Mets singled eight times, only to leave nine runners on base while going 2-for-11 with runners in scoring position and producing nary a double, triple or homer. Pete plopping to the dirt notwithstanding, they actually looked pretty swift getting to first, second and/or third on several occasions. It was the not bringing any of those runners home after the second inning that doomed them.
That and Phil Maton, I suppose. Manaea did all he could across 86 pitches, and I was OK with limiting him to five innings. Reed Garrett and Ryne Stanek held the 3-2 fort in the sixth and seventh. Maton, the second-half godsend who didn’t have it in Atlanta, didn’t suddenly rediscover it in Milwaukee. Jackson Chourio, who led off the game with a homer, smoked Maton ASAP to knot the score at three. Phil gave up a single to Blake Perkins directly thereafter, but a crisp double play (we did execute some sweet defense) erased him. Howie Rose and Keith Raad were barely done confirming that, should it be relevant, ghost runners don’t materialize in extra innings in the postseason — I’d muted ESPN — when Willy Adames singled and Garrett Mitchell made the subject of extras moot. Mitchell’s two-run homer put the Brewers up, 5-3, and you sensed the Mets would not be upending Devin Williams’s apple cart in the ninth. They didn’t.
I resisted taking my own calculation of “six more outs” too seriously when we got through the seventh. I didn’t necessarily know Maton was gonna come in, but I didn’t have a good feeling about him. After riding the runaway train known as Edwin Diaz on Sunday and Monday, I didn’t have a good feeling about him for Wednesday, either. Against the runnin’ Brew Crew, I didn’t want to see Adam Ottavino. No starter was available to step in. Max Kranick’s on the roster, but this would have been quite a spot for a Met debut. Overall, I had no idea how the Mets were going to get the six outs that would have put them in the Division Series.
More runs would have been great. Some games yearn to be won with offense. Winning with offense got us into this postseason [1], you might recall. We pierced but didn’t bludgeon starter Frankie Montas, and nudged rather than bulldozed various Milwaukee relievers. We nursed a one-run lead when we should have building a much larger version. The construction materials were right there on base.
The good news — besides a brand new blank scoreboard greeting us for Game Three, and Jose Quintana being rested enough to conceivably fill it with zeroes — is there is a touch of precedent on our side to effect the ultimate desired outcome despite what occurred to ruin Game Two [2]. We were eight outs from clinching the NLCS in 1973, when the Reds tied Game Four at Shea on Tony Perez’s seventh-inning home run off George Stone and went on to win after Pete Rose homered in the twelfth. Things worked out OK in decisive Game Five the next day behind, among others, Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw and Willie Mays (sometimes all it takes is a few immortals). And in 2015, the Mets had an opportunity to clinch the NLDS when they were up two games to one on the Dodgers, but didn’t take care of business against Clayton Kershaw at Citi Field. They never led or inspired much hope that they’d capture Game Four nine years ago. Instead, they saved their big finish [3] for winner-take-all Game Five in L.A., where Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Jeurys Familia, Curtis Granderson, Travis d’Arnaud and, most of all, Daniel Murphy conjured a 3-2 win to secure the series.
None of those guys is on this team right now, but this team and the guys we do have have brought us further than any of us dared dream they could when the season was young…hell, when the season was middle-aged. One more night awaits, one that could unlock more. Let’s root for that, shall we?