Eluding Scott was 6th sense for Mets

BY STEVE JACOBSON | Special to Newsday

August 17, 2006

We remember so clearly, so deliciously, the sight of Jesse Orosco underhanding his glove into the night sky in exultation of the last out. We remember with a gasp and a skipped heartbeat how we saw the ball skip under Bill Buckner's mitt and between his feet.

That was the World Series and the World Series is A-number one, top of the heap. The Mets were kings of all they surveyed, champions of the whole printable world.

Ah, but we forget how they got there - the improbable route through the National League Championship Series against Houston and the specter of Mike Scott over their shoulders, leering at them when they closed their eyes.

When they dared to think, it was dread of Scott. If they didn't win the sixth game, the Mets would have to hit against Scott and that split-fingered fastball in Game 7. That scared the dickens out of the most arrogant team we've seen in a generation.

The Mets were convinced he cheated by scuffing the baseball, making the bottom fall out of his pitch as they swung. But they couldn't catch him at it and they had to admit he was good at it.

They didn't have to face Scott in the seventh game, and that's how they got to the World Series. But that was the setting that gave the sixth game of the NLCS its exclamation points. People who were there can recall it as the greatest game ever played, and who could argue? The sound at the end of this one wasn't merely a sigh of relief, it was an outright gasp.

Sixth games are creepy on one side. For the team trailing three games to two, it's win or die. Both the Buckner Game and the Houston playoff game were sixth games, but different. The Red Sox were a hair from winning the World Series in the Buckner Game. The message board at Shea Stadium even had flashed momentary congratulations to Boston. Premature.

At Houston, the Mets were ahead in the series, and it was as if they were behind. They had made no contest of the National League East by winning 108 games. The Mets ended up with 116 victories, second to the 118 by the 1906 Cubs, but those Cubs didn't win the World Series. We commemorate these Mets because they did.

The Mets knew the whole league was wishing the most dreadful things on them. Not only were the Mets running toward something, they were running away from something.

"I know I had that fear of losing," dirty-shirt second baseman Wally Backman said. "I didn't want to have to answer those questions. That would have been the worst thing I've had to do in my life."

They played 4 hours, 42 minutes of 16 wildly convoluted innings in that sixth game in Houston, the longest postseason game ever played, going back to 1903. It could have stood on its own as a gem, but here the Astros were thinking if they could win this one, they had Scott going for them in the seventh game. And the Mets were looking at the dark side of that.

Shades of the 1951 Dodgers saying how they had to hit against that damn Maglie again. Scott had trumped Dwight Gooden, 1-0, in Game 1, struck out 14 Mets. Stifled them with one run in the fourth game despite repeated complaints that he was scuffing the ball.

"We kept saying Scott's not going to beat us three times," Backman said. "But he's the guy who stuffed us twice. We were the ones who had to make the adjustment."

And maybe in 1905, the Philadelphia Athletics were saying that Mathewson couldn't shut them out a third time.

The Mets were looking down the gun barrel at the pitcher who had permitted them one run and eight hits in 18 innings - and struck out 19.

"Maybe we could have beat him," said Keith Hernandez, the soul of the team. "We didn't want to go to Game 7 and have to beat him. I didn't want to say that after the fifth game, but we were all thinking that."

Scott had been an undistinguished pitcher in eight seasons in the Mets' organization. The Mets traded him for Danny Heep, for goodness sake. But Scott learned that devilish pitch and won 18 games for the second season in a row, struck out 308 batters. He pitched a no-hitter in the Astros' division clincher.

He was the inescapable thought, the inevitable destiny of the series. For eight innings of the sixth game, the Mets were chasing their tails trying to catch up to Bob Knepper. He had a 3-0 lead and the Mets had two hits. "Geez, who'd think we'd get three runs?" Hernandez said.

Tying the game in the top of the ninth was a thunderbolt. Lenny Dykstra started the comeback with a pinch-hit triple that gave them life. Ray Knight got the tying run home from third with a fly ball after falling behind two strikes.

Then Roger McDowell was pitching for the Mets, and Davey Johnson, who had managed to cultivate their arrogance, was going to exhaust his bullpen so he wouldn't have to face that guy. He said he was going to "suck" McDowell's blood.