They didn’t want to leave. Leave? It’s going to be winter for a long time. There will be so many days and nights without baseball in the months to come. They didn’t want to let go of the night, of this game, of each other. There were 44,103 in the stands. There were a couple of dozen players and staffers on the field.
Home?
Hell, they didn’t even want to walk off the field. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The stands were still full. The field was still full. They took a team picture. The players clapped at the fans, the fans applauded back. Champagne awaited them in the clubhouse, but that could keep. They wanted to cling to this. They wanted it to last a lifetime.
“We keep climbing,” Francisco Lindor said.
They do. They have been climbing since the depths of May, since 11 under .500. At one point, the Mets were 17 ½ games behind the Phillies. It didn’t look like they’d even see them again after the first of June, the Phillies were so far out ahead of them.
Now, remarkably, it was the Phillies going home. The Mets? The Mets are going to California. They’re going to the National League Championship Series. They dismissed the Phillies Wednesday, 4-1, one more time erasing a deficit, same as they have in four of their five playoff wins.
“I want to enjoy this moment,” Jose Quintana said, “for as long as they’ll let me.”
Quintana was one important faction in this ensemble baseball cast, throwing five gritty innings, allowing only one run. The Mets had abandoned a battalion of base runners across the first five innings, and there was uneasiness, concern they’d live to regret that.
Lindor changed everything.
Really, Lindor began to change everything when he agreed to be traded here, when he agreed to sign a long-term deal here, a captain in spirit if without a “C” stitched on his jersey. It didn’t go well at first. And early in this year, lurking south of .200 as late as May 21, it seemed it might never go quite the way he or Steve Cohen had hoped.
A hundred and forty-two days later, Lindor stepped to the plate in the bottom of the sixth. The bases were loaded. There was one out. And something remarkable happened, as Lindor dug in against Phillies right-hander Carlos Estevez, something impossible to see, but as obvious at Citi Field as the huge scoreboard in center field.
There was belief.
Genuine, legitimate belief. For a franchise whose most ardent followers have been trained to wait carefully for shoes to drop and skies to fall — and who would tempt a few more of those old fears a bit later when the theme park known as Edwin Diaz began searching for the strike zone — this was a departure. This was a breakthrough.
One man sure noticed. Later on, he was wearing oversized dark goggles in the clubhouse, looking positively goofy, but who tells the man who writes the checks he looks too goofy?
“I want to slay the negative Mets fan perceptions,” Cohen said, the bubbly dripping off of him. “And we’re on the way to doing it.”
They were already heading that way, however cautiously. Lindor had started that nine days earlier, in Atlanta, and Pete Alonso had added on three days later in Milwaukee. In Philadelphia last Saturday, the Mets had crafted a five-run eighth inning out of the dust.
And now, Lindor. Again.
Estevez was throwing pure kerosene: 100.3 mph, 100.1, 99.8. Lindor worked the count to 2-and-1. The at-bat had begun with the “My Girl” sing-along, and the “MVP” chants. Now Estevez reared back. More gas. Ninety-nine-point-four this time. Lindor swung.
And what followed … well, what followed was something beyond thunder, beyond joy. Lindor, as is his habit, put his head down and circled the bases, immune to the delirium. Nobody else was. In that moment, Steve Cohen’s most fervent hope seemed to take root.
“This team expects to do great things,” said Mark Vientos, who blossomed into a star in this series.
“It wasn’t ‘if’ we were going to figure out a way,” said David Peterson, who contributed two clean innings, who himself has bloomed into a foundational piece, “it was ‘when.’ ”
And then there was Brandon Nimmo, who’s seen more than any of them, who’s played an awful lot of games at Citi in front of an awful lot of empty seats, who was there two years ago when 101 wins cratered into calamity. Nimmo had dashed to the mound with the “OMG” sign a few minutes after it was over. He really looked like he might stay ’til last call.
“We knew if we get our foot in the door we’ll have a chance against anyone we play,” Nimmo said “We still feel that way.”
“It just gets better and better,” said Cohen, a Mets fan since 1963.
It does. California awaits. Fifty minutes after Diaz allowed the fans to exhale by striking out Kyle Schwarber, there were still a few thousand scattered fans. Three were still a few hundred Mets, and Mets people, on the field. One of them had a sign, and on that sign was a favorite old Mets slogan. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza saw it.
“Let’s keep believing!” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
