It's all so fleeting, every minute and every inch of it, and if the New York Mets hadn't learned that themselves over two sobering nights in Kansas City, they'd only have to consider what they awoke to early Thursday morning.
The general manager in Toronto, having built that city's first division winner in a generation, was out amid what everyone seems to be calling philosophical differences, which Alex Anthopoulos apparently could not live with. His former bosses said they regretted Anthopoulos had walked away from a five-year contract offer, which is a not-so-sneaky way of revealing the five-year contract offer, which is really kind of lousy.
The erstwhile manager in Los Angeles had jumped at one of baseball's worst gigs, that being Jeffrey Loria's head chew toy. Don Mattingly had worn two uniforms – Yankees and Dodgers. Now he'll wear the one in which seven previous managers have been buried in just the past five years. He went willingly and, it appears, suspiciously quickly. As a side note, Loria's former chew toy was fired, that being Dan Jennings, which the Miami Marlins could have announced on the day he took the manager's job and folks would not have been any less surprised Thursday.
There's change on the top steps in Washington D.C., Seattle and San Diego, and more's coming in L.A., and the Mets, of all people, should know that baseball, like everything, doesn't always play to the script (except in Miami). After all, it's why they, and not the Nationals, won the NL East. Why they, and not the Dodgers or Cubs, are here, two games into a World Series that hasn't gone at all as they planned. Why their leading men – general manager Sandy Alderson and manager Terry Collins – could hardly do anything right in their public's eyes for years, then rode around on the fans' shoulders for a few weeks, and now have to do something to fix this!
Yeah, everybody's going about their offseasons while the Mets are, you know, trying to play some freakin' baseball over here.
Problem is, as far as the people in and around the Mets are concerned, they're sneaking up on some must-win games in Queens, and a best-of-seven series sure seems like a lot of baseball until you lose the first two. Their best pitchers haven't pitched like it, they've scored one run in the last 14 innings, now even Daniel Murphy isn't hitting, and after Noah Syndergaard's Game 3 start they'll come back in Game 4 with Steven Matz, a nice young pitcher whose ninth career start could be to save their season.
That's a lot going on. And it goes fast. Ask the Cubs.
It was Jacob deGrom who, in the aftermath of a messy Game 2, repeated the same phrase several times. That was, "You gotta win four." Come to think of it, that's not that different from, "You gotta believe," which served them well once, though the players probably did most of the work.
The last team to come back from oh-two in the World Series was the '96 Yankees. Before that, the '86 Mets. None of that matters. Only Syndergaard does, and a lineup hitting .165 with one extra-base hit through two games, and two or maybe three home games to do something about it.
Collins was reminded Thursday by a writer of the adage that a series doesn't start until a team loses at home, which really only applies to sports in which there's postseason home-field (-court, -rink) advantages. To which Collins affably replied, "I don't play hockey," because Collins worked too damned long and hard for this to let oh-two wreck his World Series.
Still, he said, "We're glad to be home. We've got our fan base behind us now, and that brings out a lot of energy in our guys. There's a lot of confidence in that clubhouse. I talked to them when we got back off the field [Wednesday] night. It was a similar refrain from the night before, that is, we're down but we're not out. We fought back so many times this year, that this is just another challenge that we have to meet and so far we've met them all."
Maybe the Mets, as a group, are sure they can do this. Maybe not. They're certainly not the best team you've ever seen. They're not the best team you've seen in the last, oh, 24 hours. But here they are, at home, a big ol' hoss on the mound, Billy Joel on the anthem, with nothing having been done to them yet that can't be undone.
"You gotta win four," deGrom said with his lips pulled tight across his teeth and his eyes dark, almost like a threat.
So that's it. Win four. If they don't, the Royals will. And it could go fast.
No comments:
Post a Comment