Terry Collins knew better. Decades of running baseball games on two continents had taught the New York Mets manager to ignore pleas like those from the bearded man with piercing eyes who was screaming “I want this game.” He understood bravado fueled by pumping blood. He knew enough to say “no” to Matt Harvey.
Except he couldn’t say “no”.
“I let my heart get in the way of my gut,” he said.
And it cost the Mets the World Series.
Who knows if Sunday’s 7-2 Game 5 loss to Kansas City that gave the Royals the championship will be the only chance the Mets get at a title in the foreseeable future. They have a splendid group of young starting pitchers, after all. But Collins has been managing since the early 1980s and this was his first World Series. He knows how hard it is to get here. And he knows that if only he had said “no” his first World Series would still be going.
But sometimes it’s the decisions of the heart that are the worst calls of all.
For eight innings and nearly 100 pitches Harvey had kept the Royals from anything more than four singles. His fastball crackled at 97mph. The Kansas City hitters waved feebly at his slider. During one stretch on Sunday he struck out seven of eight hitters who stepped in against him. The Mets led 2-0 and the story of their survival was all Harvey. He was downright overpowering.
And yet Collins knew that Harvey – at 216 innings in the year after undergoing elbow ligament replacement known as Tommy John surgery – was in a place where no pitcher coming off Tommy John had ever been before. He might have looked strong and felt strong but the time had come to give the ball to the team’s closer Jeurys Familia.
Above the dugout more than 44,000 people were shouting into the night, stomping on the concrete beneath their feet, pleading with Collins to please keep the bullpen door closed.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Harvey! Harvey! Harvey!”
The pitcher with the beard and the piercing eyes glared furiously at Collins. His chest heaved.
“I want this game in the worst way,” Harvey shouted.
And with the frenzy of his pitcher and the thundering of the crowd overhead, Collins caved. Decades of good baseball sense learned in the US and Japan left him. He looked at Harvey and nodded.
“Go get ‘em,” he told the pitcher.
When the ninth started, Harvey jumped up the dugout steps and sprinted to the mound as no pitcher ever does nearly 100 pitches into the game.
Of course we know now what happened. We know that Harvey walked the Lorenzo Cain, the Royals first batter of the inning. We know he gave up a double to Eric Hosmer that drove in Cain. We know that only then, with the series on the line, did Collins pull Harvey and call for Familia. We know too there was a ground ball and a sprint home by Hosmer that tied the game and that the Royals finally won with five runs in the 12th. We know now it was a bad decision to leave Harvey in the game.
“It was my fault,” Collins said.
But did he really have a choice? The Mets have four fine young starters but Harvey is perhaps the best. He is the most prominent, known in this city ‘The Dark Knight of Gotham.’ Some fans literally wear Batman masks in honor of Harvey who seems to revel in his superhero status.
“In that situation how can you not want the ball right there?” Harvey later said. “I handled (the Royals) offense really well. I just wanted the ball. I wanted to be out there.”
He shook his head. The night had been so charged. In his biggest game he thought he certainly could get three outs the way he had gotten the first 24. The Royals, though, are a pesky team they are, as their first-base coach Rusty Kuntz says: “Go, go, go until we make you crack.” And after eight innings of a game he had dominated, Harvey had cracked. Now all he could do was stand at his locker and look down as he talked.
The clock beside his locker in the Mets clubhouse read: “12:45 AM.” The game would have been over long before if only Collins had said “no” when Harvey demanded to stay in the game. But it was too late for that now. On the field outside many of the Royals players were still celebrating. Their locker room smelled like 100 bottles of champagne had exploded at once, which is essentially what had happened. Alcohol dripped from the ceiling.
Harvey stood beside an orange sticker affixed to the wall. The sticker was shaped like bat wings with his silhouette wearing his jersey number 33. The Dark Knight of Gotham had answered his city’s call for eight of nine innings and then he talked his manager into that ninth.
“I wanted to finish what I started,” Harvey said.
“As a competitor in a winning situation it’s everything you want,” he added.
“It was hard for me to leave,” he later said. “I had so much fun tonight (the fans were incredible. Their energy was incredible.”
Down the hall, Collins sat at an interview table, replaying the moment that shouldn’t have happened.
“It’s my fault,” the manager said. “It’s not his. That’s who he is. I know better that that. I know he wants the ball, he never wants to come out and he was pitching good ...
“This was my fault.”
And baseball season was over.
