Let’s Get Pivotal

Intrigue lurked here and there among the Mets and Cardinals for seven innings Sunday afternoon. So, frankly, did boredom. As a baseball fan, you don’t want to dismiss a game with little scoring as boring; as a baseball fan, you are conditioned to appreciate tautness and tension, and there was a little much action between nothing happening to write this one off as action-challenged. Three fabulous catches by St. Louis left fielder Brendan Donovan reminded you of how Whitey Herzog’s Running Redbirds used to break our hearts. Conversely, Donovan couldn’t nab everything, and his teammates didn’t seem as fundamentally sound as Cardinals did in Herzog’s or Tony La Russa’s day (no complaints on that account)

I thought the visitors would bust things open in a flash since Jose Quintana was in trouble early, much like Jose Butto on Friday and Adrian Houser on Saturday, extending a discouraging trend. Quintana needed 26 pitches to get through the first. Given how he labored, it already felt like the Mets were losing. But they weren’t. There’s inevitably something encouraging about looking up at a game that doesn’t seem to be going well, pitched by a starter who’s discovered his groove, and realizing your team isn’t behind.

So intrigue lurked, even if it didn’t utterly capture the imagination. The Cardinals mounted a Whiteyball rally in the fifth: double; productive groundout; sac bunt, with the run scoring and the bunter reaching. Easy enough to figure the walls were about to cave in. Except Quintana’s groove wasn’t all that penetrable. Donovan the fielder didn’t drive Michael Siani the bunter in from second, and Willson Contreras the catcher lined out to end any further threat.

Lance Lynn, yet another unexciting veteran Cardinal starter who just gets the job done year after year, prevented the Mets from reaching the scoreboard in the fifth, just as he had in the first through fourth. But Francisco Lindor led off the sixth with a homer to left, knotting matters at one. Francisco has been inconsistent (or a little too consistent in the wrong direction) thus far this season, but whenever he homers, the Mets win. He’s either a differencemaker or a frontrunner.

Quintana was less a differencemaker than a maintainer of the status quo in the seventh. Seven innings for a Mets starter! The spiritual equivalent of a complete game in the 2020s! That pitch count that looked so high after one was tamed, so much so that you’re not gonna believe this, but Jose took the mound to start the eighth. Siani attempted another bunt. It didn’t work. One out. Donovan tried to conjure more bad juju. No dice on their side. Two out. The lefty pitcher got his lefty batters, doing his job and a tad more. With righty Contreras due up, this is where the modern manager comes in and takes the ball to bring in his percentage pitcher, in this case Adam Ottavino. Carlos Mendoza is too new to not be modern. Any individual promoted to major league manager these days is going to collaborative, collegial and ultimately predictable…or so you’d predict.

Thing is, we haven’t hung out with Mendoza to know him enough to predict anything. Sunday we got to know this much: he’s not always going to manage by the printout or PDF or whatever is transmitted to him by the analytics department. Let’s not automatically infer it’s baseball people versus the data scientists eternally dueling for the soul of the game. Let’s have faith that everybody pulls together to strategize for moments like these. But anybody watching was absolutely certain Mendoza was about to take out a starting pitcher who had retired his previous ten batters and looked capable of getting his eleventh. Quintana conveyed to his manager that he was good to keep going.

Mendoza said OK, it’s yours.

I have to admit I was a little sleepy around this point of the afternoon and wouldn’t have minded drifting off, but this woke me up. A manager leaving in a starter because the starter was rolling and the starter — a mature pitcher not obviously swept up in the moment (it’s not like this was Game Five of the World Series), but someone whose self-assessment you sensed you could trust, if you didn’t already trust your very own eyes — not wanting to leave.

OK, it was Quintana’s. And Quintana struck out Contreras to end the eighth, a performance that transcended mere satisfaction that a Met starter went deep. A Met starter was permitted to go deep. A Met manager acted situationally rather than automatically. One fewer third of an inning from a relief corps that, no matter how solid it’s been, pitches far too much felt WAY bigger than 0.1 IP in the box score.

It also felt pivotal, and not just for preventing a nap for this couch-glued observer. The last time the Mets faced the Cardinals in the postseason, there was a catch in left field even Brendan Donovan couldn’t have made. In the minutes after Endy Chavez did make it, the Mets loaded the bases with one out to preserve a 1-1 score. Of course Endy’s grab above the wall to rob Scott Rolen and then double up Jim Edmonds was supremely pivotal in the scheme of what you were sure was going to happen next, especially in the bottom of the inning. The Mets were going to take the lead. And of course two Mets batters (one of them Chavez) left those bases loaded, teaching us the harsh lesson that even the greatest of moments can’t ensure the thing you’d really prefer happen next.

What we wanted in the bottom of the eighth was for the Mets to build on the momentum Quintana and Mendoza had provided them. Sure enough, Lindor walks and steals second, and Pete Alonso walks, and D.J. Stewart moves them over with a double play ground ball that second baseman Nolan Gorman can turn into only an out at first — Redbird keystone predecessor Paul De Jong would have made that play and simultaneously driven in three Cardinal runs. We have two runners in scoring position, only one out, and secret weapon hiding in plain sight Tyrone Taylor up. How can our righteous cause fail?

By Taylor grounding to shortstop Masyn Wynn, who’s playing in and cuts off the grounder and fires it to the plate in plenty of time to throw out Lindor. You were disappointed Francisco didn’t score. You just hoped he didn’t hurt himself sliding into the catcher (he didn’t). After that best chance went by the wayside, Jeff McNeil grounded out, and the immediate momentum from Quintana staying in was over.

Yet its long-term impact lingered. I won’t go so far as to say I didn’t care whether the Mets won, but the little win within the day’s battle, with the manager triumphing over rote management and the pitcher validating his confidence, would be consolation enough for me if we couldn’t get what we were looking for. Had to keep looking for it, though. Ottavino’s warmups from the eighth would be relegated to dry hump status (thanks, Mickey Callaway, for planting that phrase in my head) and Edwin Diaz would come in for the ninth. Diaz didn’t deliver nine sliders for nine strikes and exit to an overwrought light show, but he did put down the Cardinals in order. Matthew Liberatore, who had entered in the eighth to face McNeil, stayed in for the ninth and successfully worked around a one-out single to Mark Vientos.

Liberatore and Vientos. Remember those names.

Extra innings appeared, as did a phantom at second base. It wasn’t De Jong the Metkiller of recent yore, thank goodness, just one of those pesky ghost runners. Four years into this contrivance, and I’m finally unsurprised by their existence. I’ll get back to you around 2030 regarding the DH. Diaz threw twenty pitches in the ninth, so he wasn’t sticking around. Reed Garrett was on, which meant you expected Reed Garrett to be on, as he is, after all, the Reed Garrett, the lone reliever to hop off the Syracuse-to-LaGuardia loop and make himself vital in Flushing. Delightfully, the ghost runner faded into oblivion as the Cardinals could push the specter no further than third.

Revelatory Reed Garrett, you’ve done it again.

Now it was the Mets’ turn to trot somebody who didn’t belong on second to second and take advantage of this inane get-it-over-with rule. Liberatore, who was apparently the Cardinals’ only available reliever, stayed on and showed no reason he shouldn’t have. The Mets made nothing of the manufactured threat. It was off to the eleventh. Ostensibly, I was rooting for the Mets to win soon. In my heart, I wanted this game that was making the most of its intrigue to not end. Usually I lean that way to spite Rob Manfred (like he cares what happens in a baseball game), but Sunday, I just wanted to keep watching.

The top of the eleventh encapsulated the Cardinals we saw all afternoon pretty well. There was Siani on second, out of thin air. There was Donovan, back to haunt us, with single to right to score Siani. There was a relay into the infield that nailed a less-than-alert Donovan, because in addition to the Cardinals not packing an adequate quantity of bullpen arms, they didn’t bring their fundies. There was Contreras walking. There was Nolan Arenado flying into shallow left. There was Contreras getting doubled off first in some odd tribute to Jim Edmonds in Game Seven of 2006. Edmonds at least had the excuse that Endy made an unprecedented, unbelievable, unmatched catch and followed it with a devastating throw. Contreras simply didn’t seem to have any idea how many outs there were. There were one when Arenado swung. Once Contreras was doubled off, there were three.

It was shame Revelatory Reed had been tagged, however lightly. The Cardinals were ahead, 2-1, and I was briefly transported back to another NLCS, 1999’s, Game Five. It was the top of the fifteenth inning, day long turned into night, a permanent Mets-Braves deadlock of 2-2 at last broken when Keith Lockhart tripled home Walt Weiss. Damn, I thought then, the Mets could actually lose. For fourteen-plus innings, I hadn’t considered the possibility. The Mets scoring, something they hadn’t done since the first, was no longer optional. We had to get at least one run. We got two. Had Todd Pratt not tackled Robin Ventura, we would have gotten five, but it’s a better story this way, I keep telling myself.

The stakes weren’t as high in the sunshine of April 2024 as they were amid the rains of October 1999, but another of baseball’s charms is the sport’s ability to timeshift the longtime viewer. Back to the present day, with Liberatore the Cardinals’ forever pitcher and DJ Stewart the ghost runner (ghost chugger?) on second. Making something out of this Manfred-rigged opportunity was imperative. Again, I was asking for just one run. I wanted a tie in the interim, and continuation of this contest into perpetuity.

Taylor grounded out in that helpful way Taylor has of doing things. Stewart moved to third. McNeil lined out. Stewart stayed at third. No more outs can possibly be of use. Am I really going to be reduced to rationalizing a modest moral victory on Quintana’s behalf? I could deal with that for Sunday, but it didn’t feel like authentic punctuation to what was one out from a Cardinal sweep. We were somnambulant Friday, lethargic most of Saturday. Sunday, however, we intrigued. We should at least get an overtime point for our troubles.

Harrison Bader singled to center, and Stewart stormed home. My tie was secured. Vientos, who had been inserted in the game as a pinch-hitter for Brett Baty to take advantage of Liberatore being a lefty all those innings before (two, but it seemed like more), was up. Like Garrett, Vientos could have made the team out of Spring Training. Like Garrett, Vientos didn’t. It was only because Starling Marte went on the bereavement list that Mark was recalled this weekend. I’m glad somebody remembered he was available.

Liberatore (3 IP) wasn’t so happy about it. Vientos took the southpaw over the center-right field wall, an excellent place to give a tour to opposing pitchers. “Directly in front of us are a whole bunch of guys Jose Quintana let rest today.” Nobody tackled anybody until bases were safely circled. Mets 4 Cardinals 2 was the final. I no longer had my tie, but I was fine with pivoting to the eleven-inning win.