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No sense of relief in this Mets victory

Wallace Matthews

September 18, 2008

WASHINGTON

At second base, Jose Reyes and Luis Castillo leaped gracefully into the air like a couple of ballet dancers and exchanged a triumphant high-five as if they had just won the World Series. But in the Mets dugout, Jerry Manuel didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"These guys, they'll turn a laugher into a tearjerker," he said. Manuel may be an interim manager, but for the Mets, he is a full-time worrywart, and with good reason.

Last night, his moribund lineup roused itself to hit four home runs, two by Carlos Beltran. They chased Nationals starter Shairon Martis after three innings and opened a 7-1 lead. They even added those tack-on runs that have proven so elusive for them recently.

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And still, here they were, needing five pitchers to nail down the last six outs and sweating out yet another ninth inning with the tying run at bat. "We'll laugh about this, hopefully, in November," Manuel said after the Mets struggled to a 9-7 win over the second-losingest team in major-league baseball. But it's still as likely they will cry about this in October.

More and more, watching the Mets play is like watching an NBA game. You know nothing significant is going to happen until the very end, even if, like last night, they fill a highlight reel at the beginning. You just know it's all going to come down to that last five minutes.

Their victory over the Nationals did not move them back into first place in the NL East - the Phillies, 6-1 winners over the Atlanta Braves, still hold a half-game edge - nor did it open any breathing room in the wild-card race with the Milwaukee Brewers, who also won.

Having lost the first two games of this series after having dropped two of three to the Braves at home over the weekend, there was no redemption in this victory and little relief. If anything, it was a reprieve, and a one-night reprieve, because with a bullpen like the one that trudged out to the mound with regularity over the last four innings, Collapse II could resume any day now. Even tonight, with Johan Santana on the mound.

"This was not fun," Manuel acknowledged. "You think that's fun, walking out to the mound every three minutes? People didn't come here to see me do that. They came to see the players play."

Mostly, they came to see the Mets get their season back on track, the announced attendance of 25,019 swelled with Amtrak invaders from New York City. What they saw was further evidence that the final 11 games of this season are guaranteed to provide agony with no assurance of ecstasy in the end.

"We needed to win, that was the most important thing," Manuel said. "We kinda needed to stop the slide."

Whether the slide has been stopped or merely interrupted remains to be seen. Either way, it is going to be a bumpy ride. "I still got some guys left," Manuel joked when it was pointed out to him that despite opening a six-run lead, he still needed to use seven pitchers in relief of Brandon Knight, who got through five shaky but mostly harmless innings.

Still, on a night in which Reyes deposited the fifth pitch of the game into the far reaches of right-centerfield, Carlos Delgado hit one nearly to the Capitol dome two batters later, and Beltran contributed two lasers, one from each side of the plate, it still came down to a sweaty-palms confrontation between Luis Ayala, the interim closer, and someone named Roger Bernadina.

Already, two runs had scored in the inning, thanks to David Wright's throwing error, a walk by Joe Smith to Elijah Dukes, and a two-run single by Wil Nieves, the light-hitting former Yankees catcher, off Pedro Feliciano. At that point, Manuel made the move he seemed to be avoiding, bringing in Ayala, who had blown Sunday's game against the Braves. The matchup with Bernadina, a rookie batting .148 with no home runs and one RBI, wasn't exactly Gossage versus Yastrzemski, but considering the urgency of the situation and the ever-deepening hole the Mets have been digging for themselves, no less dramatic.

Ayala got Bernadina to swing through a fastball, Reyes and Castillo performed their pas de deux and Manuel let out one huge sigh of relief. "After [Ayala] got two strikes, I thought he had enough to throw one more by him," he said. "I didn't want him trying no funny stuff. When he got that last strike, it looked to me like it was in slow motion."

Painfully slow, and even on a night that should have been a laugher, not a whole lot of fun.