When Four Become One

Monday was Jesse Orosco’s birthday, so for a moment I thought the Mets were honoring him by nearly but not quite blowing a formidable ninth-inning lead. In the mind’s eye, Jesse flirted with disaster a lot in his not quite best years. In his best years, he was infallible in the mind’s eye. The mind’s eye doesn’t look things up to confirm hunches.

The rest of me does, however, so no, Jesse Orosco never had a game almost exactly like the one that one of his most celebrated successors as Mets closer did Monday. Nor did any of the famously nerve-wracking closers who have injected the ninth innings with agita and antacids in the years between Jesse’s glove and Timmy’s trumpet filling the Flushing air in their own manner.

How we should celebrate every save.

Let’s be clear on our terms. What happened in the ninth Monday night at Citi Field, after the Mets had built a luxurious lead of 5-0 versus Aaron Nola & Co. on…

• two Francisco Lindor home runs (including another leadoff keynote in the first and a later three-run bomb that happily evoked last October’s happiest madness);

• a Jesse Winker dinger;

• Tylor Megill’s further ascent toward rotation eminence via five-and-a-third frames worth of zeroes;

• and more sterling Yeomen of the Bullpen work when Carlos Mendoza judged Megill done after 92 pitches

…was the second of the evening’s Yeomen, Max Kranick, ran out of whatever fueled his scoreless seventh and eighth. Maybe Max wasn’t prepared to go from munching middle innings in relative anonymity to capturing his first major league save. He gave up three hits and a run without retiring a Phillie in the top of the ninth. Too bad Kranick couldn’t put the thing in the books and notch something sexier than a hold in the process, but that’s why we had a sizable edge and that’s why we have a closer.

Enter “Narco” man. Enter Edwin Diaz. Edwin Diaz locks games down, no muss, no fuss, right? Oh, wait, I’m working from an older script. There’s some muss. There’s some fuss. There are some Tums if you got ’em. But mostly you can count on Sugar to make the ninth-inning medicine go down. And, sure enough, Edwin secures the first much-needed out by flying Cal Stevenson to left. We could all breathe easy now.

Until the next batter, Bryson Stott, shot a three-run homer way the hell out of the park to make the game Mets 5 Phillies 4. Oh, those inherited runners. The Phillies were dead and buried for eight innings, and now they were alive and annoying, riding a real chance to upend not just this game but maybe the momentum of the divisional race. Yeah, it’s only April, But it was April in 1986 when we upended the Cardinals for the duration of that year. It was also April in 2018 when that humongous and admittedly inexplicable start we got off to (12-2) came crashing down in one inglorious eighth inning. Jacob deGrom handed his 6-1 lead versus the defending division champion Nationals with one out over to Jerry Blevins, who handed a three-run lead to AJ Ramos, who handed a two-run lead to Jeurys Familia, who completed the score’s conversion to a one-run Mets deficit. That was all in the same eighth inning. Hansel Robles came on in the ninth to make it worse. Final: Nationals 8 Mets 6. The 2018 Mets’ implosion was officially in progress.

A ninth inning that’s getting away gives the mind’s eye a lot of leeway to wander. It wandered from Diaz to thinking of that particular game from seven years ago to wondering if maybe Orosco’s glove was coming down on Edwin’s head at a most inopportune interval. This was too great a game amid too great a start to totally get away, but the scoreboard wasn’t lying that it was now a one-run affair, with that bleeping Phillie heart of the order coming up.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to forlornness. Edwin Diaz turned back into Edwin Diaz. The good Edwin Diaz, I mean. Trea Turner goes down swinging. Bryce Harper goes down swinging. That’s all the swinging the Phillies get to do. The Mets hang on, 5-4. Megill gets his third win. Reed Garrett is credited with his seventh hold. Max Kranick gets one of those obscurities, too. And, from the annals of statistics that say what statistics say, Edwin Diaz nailed down his sixth save. The parameters were there. He came in with the tying run on deck and the other team never tied him. Way to technically go, Diaz!

No, of course it wasn’t the ideal way to go, but when somebody picks you up when they say they’ll pick you up, are you choosy about how they got there? Still, I thought, what an arduous method to earn a save. Orosco in his Messy Jesse moments must have had one of those. Or the Hall of Famer Billy Wagner. Surely Franco or Benitez, 1A and 1B in those nightmares we still have in which somebody is insisting to us, “Think of all the saves they don’t blow.” I’m often one of those doing the insisting, because high-profile Mets closers through the ages haven’t blown most of their save opportunities; it only feels like they do. And Diaz didn’t blow this one. If you tuned in an instant after Stott and just ahead of Turner, you saw only the toast of Timmy Trumpet’s tooting.

I had to confirm that something very much like this had happened at least once before to a Met in eerily similar circumstances. And it had. Once.

Thanks to the marvel Baseball-Reference calls its Stathead tool, I was able to enter the relevant criteria:

Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save

As of Monday night, Stathead listed one Met pitcher as having previously filed such a performance. It wasn’t any Met closer you’d instinctively think of because the pitcher never held the title of Met closer. But on September 22, 2012, Jon Rauch, usually a setup guy (and a generally reliable one), was entrusted to finish what had been an R.A. Dickey masterpiece. By the latter half of September 2012, R.A. Dickey masterpieces were essentially all we had to root for. R.A. delivered that Saturday as he delivered virtually every day he wrapped his knuckles around the ol’ Rawlings. For eight innings, he had the Marlins shut out, cruising home with a 4-0 lead, his nineteenth win of the season clearly in sight. As the man for whom pitch counts were of little concern, Dickey was permitted by Terry Collins to continue his mastery of Miami into the ninth. The Citi Field crowd loved it. I can attest to that, as I was part of that crowd.

Ah, but the ninth this day wasn’t R.A.’s terrain. He walked Greg Dobbs on four pitches to start the inning. Donovan Solano followed by doubling. With dang Fish occupying second and third, Terry removed our simultaneously soft-spoken and loquacious ace and replaced him with the towering Rauch. All I really remember about Rauch was his height (six-eleven) and a story that came out the next year that he attempted to haze then-rookie Matt Harvey, tossing water on the new star while he dozed on a trainer’s table and destroying the kid’s phone in the process. Harvey reportedly won instant clubhouse cred by standing up to the veteran and telling the taller man to knock it the bleep off, or words to that effect. Rauch’s pitching I don’t remember that much, except that he nearly blew Dickey’s twentieth win. But that was five days later. The nineteenth win for our folk hero was still on the table.

Second and third, and Rauch makes it not easy. The first batter he faces is Miami catcher John Buck. Buck will become part of Harvey’s dizzying story in 2013 after a) he’s traded to the Blue Jays and b) traded by the Blue Jays to the Mets for, among others, R.A. Dickey. Buck will later be remembered mainly for nurturing Harvey Day Hysteria to its apogee; driving in runs like a madman in April but only April; and slamming a celebratory pie into Jordany Valdespin’s face in one of those episodes when postgame questions didn’t include any variation of this year’s nightly query of “how great is this right now?” The 2025 Mets get asked that continually and respond that it’s very great. The 2013 Mets were just trying to protect their faces and new phones.

But that was 2013. This was 2012. Buck was still a Marlin and, against Rauch, he was a September slugger. Despite my Saturday companion Joe calling out toward the mound, “YOU BETTER NOT GIVE UP A HOMER HERE RAUCH!” Rauch gave up a homer there. Two inherited runners scored, as did the batter. The four-run lead that Rauch came in to safeguard was now one, and the batter on deck who had qualified it as a save situation was up. That was Gil Velazquez. He struck out.

All right, slate clean, maybe we get through this with minimal angst from here. (Which is what I told myself after Stott took Diaz deep.) But, no, not really. There’s a pinch-hit single before a fielder’s choice groundout. Then there’s a stolen base. At last, there’s a strikeout, Rauch’s second. In all, he faced five Marlins before making sure the Mets would win, 4-3, and Dickey would move to 19-6.

Inherited runners: 2 or more
Inherited runners scored: 2 or more
Home runs allowed: 1 or more
Batters faced: 4 or more
Strikeouts: 2 or more
Innings pitched: 1 or more
Decision: save

It was an ugly save, just as that scene with Harvey getting drenched must have been, but it was a save nonetheless, the final of four Rauch recorded as a Met. Thus ends the Jon Rauch-Edwin Diaz comparison. Diaz, we’re pretty certain, would never haze a rookie, phenom or otherwise. The Met vibe is beautiful these days. And a fifth consecutive win remains a win despite one pitcher reducing a ninth-inning four-run lead to one, just as a save remains a save, no matter how not beautiful it felt to endure until that definitive second K slammed the game shut. The 16-7 first-place Mets came out ahead by one — which is the minimum run differential required for a team to win — and Diaz indeed has an “S” affixed to his name in the box score. Also, as of this morning, he has joined Rauch in the results portion of my highly specific Stathead search.

In the mind’s eye, all saves oughta be worthy of Orosco-style Series-clinching exultation, no matter how much Pepcid we keep handy.