Mets Police 90’s Week: It’s Outta Here! Catcher of the Day

That night the Mets would play the first one-game playoff in club history. There’d only been a dozen ever held (we’re not counting the individual games back when the NL held series for such things, but actual team-on-team tiebreakers). The Mets had gone from the brink of the first Steve Phillips coach firing tizzy to controlling the wild card to letting it tumble out of our hands and into those of that skinny kid from the neighborhood to Melvin Mora hopping into the sewer and getting the ball back. And now we’d play for all the marbles.

Around 3 p.m., I stopped pushing papers around my desk and turned on “Mike and the Mad Dog” and did busy work until game time. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. And yet somehow I still missed Edgardo Alfonzo’s home run in the first inning. That was all right. I was just happy to know there was a “2” hanging on a scoreboard in Cincinnati. Each time the Mets tacked on a run from there—what a concept!—I let out a sigh while my stomach tensed up knowing how bad it would feel if they blew this now. Al Leiter entered the ninth with a one-hitter. He gave up a hit, and a walk, and then there’s a line drive out of the picture and that’ll put the tying run on deck, and…no, Fonzie caught it. It’s over. It’s over! Playoffs. Postseason. Division Series. Whatever the hell you want to call it, there it is.

There was a 5-ounce bottle of champagne in the fridge someone had brought a year or two earlier and on the bookshelf was this little egg with confetti in it someone had also brought over and left. I drank one and cracked the other over my head when Duck called one minute after it was over. I didn’t really expect anything more out of 1999. The Diamondbacks were a second-year team, but they were also a 100-win club. They had Randy Johnson. Jay Bell and Matt Williams were having unbelievable years with Luis Gonzalez batting between them and tormenting pitchers who tried to get cute. They had Matt Mantei as closer. And they had home field advantage. But this was the playoffs. After a dozen seasons without. You had to be in it to win it.

I didn’t even care that the Division Series opener started at 11 p.m. I was giddy when the Mets hung in there and Fonzie slammed one in the ninth. The next night’s 11 p.m. start? That was cruel. When the Mets fell behind by multiple runs in the seventh inning and we nearing 2 a.m. after a stressful week, I can say at that moment I fell asleep during a Mets playoff game for the only time in my life. I should only be so sleepy again in this lifetime.

Game 3 was the first postseason game at Shea since a bizarro Columbus Day afternoon game in 1988 that was as somber as a memorial service. This one had a solemn tone at the start as Mike Piazza’s injured hand meant he was out for at least the two games at Shea. Todd Pratt, who hadn’t started or had a hit in 19 days and whose last home run had come on April 22, would be behind the plate. But the catcher was only needed to frame pitches that homeplate umpire Rick Rieker called balls unless they were in a fist-size area in the middle of the plate. You know he was squeezing the pitchers when Rick Reed, who could throw strikes from second base using a volleyball, walked three guys. It didn’t hurt Reeder like it did Omar Daal. Mets 9, Diamondbacks 2.

Saturday morning, a week after the Mets only had the faintest chance of making the postseason, they were suddenly a game away from winning the Division Series. And if it was going to happen they’d better do it today, as they’d have to turn around and fly to Phoenix for a deciding Sunday game against Randy Johnson.

Game 4 had Al Leiter. The same guy who’d gone .500 during the year before pitching the best non no-hitter of his life in his previous start in the one-game playoff in Cincinnati. He looked even better on a gorgeous afternoon at Shea. Leiter did not allow a hit into the fifth inning and had a 1-0 lead on Fonzie’s home run. Greg Colbrunn ended several fantasies with a homer of his own.

The Mets retook the lead when Benny Agbayani doubled in Ricky Henderson in the sixth. Leiter set down the D-backs in order in the seventh—and this was with Roger Cedeno inserted into the game for defense! Just six outs. Then five. Then four. Then a two-out walk. Then a single. Then Bob Apodaca walking out with arm extended. Then Leiter was gone.

In trundled Armando Benitez. To cheers. Sure, he’d blown six saves—the worst of his career to that point and a number he wouldn’t surpass until his last half-season as a Met in 2003—but he was so much better than John Franco. When fans got a load of the heat he threw in the eighth inning and then saw the junk that closer Franco bounced in front of the plate in the ninth, the WFAN airwaves crackled with people calling for a flip flop of reliever roles. Franco maintained the closer job until he injured his ring finger in the final inning on Fireworks Night with the Mets down, 13-0. He was relieved by Matt Franco—the first Mets nonpitcher to ever pitch at Shea—and Cedeno took second and Reed right field. That Franco promptly allowed a three–run homer. Matt Franco pitched in another blowout a few weeks later. The other Franco didn’t appear again until September. By then he’d been flip flopped.

Benitez and all his heat came in to face Jay Bell, the former steady Bucco turned sudden sluggo in the desert. Bell promptly doubled in both runs. Benitez walked Luis Gonzalez intentionally and then faced Williams. Base hit. Before we could get out more than one expletive, Melvin Mora, newly stationed in left field took it on a hop and gunned to Pratt, who tagged out Bell. The Mets were down, but at least the inning was over. And you just knew that closing out big games would never be the same again.

Duck, Jim, Paul, and I tried to get our pessimistic thoughts together for between inning banter. I stared down below my seat and saw a cup with liquid in it that in the all the excitement I’d forgotten all about. It was warm for October and I offered to pass it around for those devastated and thirsty all at once. Gregg Olson immediately fell behind Alfonzo and walked him. Greg Swindell entered and the cup was passed around once more, only now it was a chalice. “The cup, the cup,” was uttered as it was passed around while the high priest of Mets clutchness, the man whose arrival—along with Bobby V’s first full season and the installation of Reed in the rotation—had signaled a change in fortunes at Shea. Maybe the Cup—one walk and it had already moved to a capital letter—could help coerce some kind of Shea magic. Or maybe not.

A high fly to right wasn’t going to do any good. Tony Womack, career second baseman turned shortstop turned right fielder after Arizona took the lead, settled under it and…dropped the ball. He dropped the goddamn ball! Go! Go! Go! Olerud took second and Fonzie went to third. Nobody out.

Now here came the Mets’ defensive replacement, Roger Cedeno. Batting rig-handed, he smacked it out to center field, Alfonzo tagged, and it was tied. We passed around The Cup once more (now the The is even capitalized). It didn’t work, this time. Pratt grounded back to Matt Mantei who caught Olerud off third and tagged him out. Pratt’s bat was almost as worthless as Ordonez’s, which he used to whiff with the bases loaded. But it was tied. It was tied.

Benitez retired the Diamondbacks in the ninth. Mantei got through trouble in the home ninth. Franco came in to pitch—John, not Matt—and looked like a closer, retiring once-and-future Mets Kelly Stinnett and Lenny Harris. (Stinnett was the starting catcher, but Harris had actually entered the game in a double switch in the eighth. The same inning that Arizona manager Buck Showalter had moved his shortstop to right field, and watched him drop a pop fly, Showalter then removed four-time Gold Glove third baseman and MVP candidate Matt Williams, who had 142 RBIs during the year, in place of Lenny Harris in a must-win game. As Monty Burns once proclaimed, “It’s what smart managers do to win ballgames.”) Franco ending the inning by retiring Womack, whose flub had kept everyone in the park.

I was in the bathroom for that at-bat. Knowing that it would be packed when the inning ended I snuck in to the field level head and found myself alone. Except for some tall guy in a Mets hat. Tim Robbins. I knew he was a big Mets/Rangers fan and he’d also been around enough crowds to know that this is when one goes to the can. I’ve seen celebrities around Shea on occasion and normally I’m pretty good with giving them a nod or something like “I’m in the know; you’re cool.” This time I actually spoke: “Hey that thing you do, it’s good.” He nodded, smiled, and moved out the door from me like I was one of those unkind jailbirds in the bathroom in The Shawshank Redemption.  But there’d be redemption. For everyone who stayed through extras.

Robin Ventura seemed liked the last best hope of getting something started before the 11th inning, but Mantei got him easily. The came Pratt. Ordonez on deck. Rey-Rey actually had four hits and had knocked in a couple of runs in the series; Pratt was 0 for 7 with two walks as Piazza’s replacement. Would Franco come out for the next inning. Or would it be Wendell. Or would…

(I know that just about every person out there knows what happened, but let me tell it already.)

Whack! “Wow, he got that one all right. Steve Finley’ll get it. Hey, that thing’s carrying. Crap, Finley’s got it.” Then Finley looked in his glove and his head fell. Scores of Mets fans bred to expect the worst, to anticipate the game-saving catch by the opposition, burst out as one. I’m sure if Tim Robbins was sitting near me, we might have eve have exchanged a man hug. Well, maybe another nod. I stood on my seat and watched Pratt round the bases, greeted by the mass of Mets at home. All in white. No names, just numbers. Forever clustered around home plate in my mind, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Why is it when the Mets do poorly or lose in tragic fashion, like they did the night I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. to write this piece, I can remember every agonizing detail. Now the story sort of dissolves into hugs and high fives of everybody we passed. Of hanging out in the parking lot and riding back home in Jimmy’s truck with three of us in two seats. Why do the bad times seem like the more concrete moments? Or are at least easier to explain. I guess for the same reason the newspaper headlines usually aren’t, “Everything Great! No Worries, People.” At least not in New York.

It was a thorny set of emotions to explain then and it became yet more complicated in December of 1998, when Todd Pratt appeared in the Mitchell Report. This grand moment, this #3 out of 300-plus moments I’ve had at Shea, is a little tarnished. Was he taking something that may have given him a little boost to get the ball over the fence. Is that how he went from pizza delivery guy to hero for a day? You wish not because Tank was one of those guys you rooted for, whom you knew would be a coach or manager someday. But something from that day was lost with the Mitchell Report. It’ll disappear from people’s memory one day, just as announcers rarely bring it up now after less than 10 months. I guess we have to let it go, to see how all this plays out in the course of history that this game is built around.

Maybe it’s a little tainted now, but then it was pure, it was joy. It was getting that “A” on your report card you never ever expected, that girl coming over to talk to you, that promotion you didn’t see coming. Maybe you later got a B-minus in the same subject, or the girl turned out to be a bitch, or the promotion brought little money and more hassle, but you made that happen. It happened to you. Take it and move on.