One minute the New York Mets were looking at the prospect of extending this delicious, evenly matched jewel of a World Series to seven games. The next the National League champions found themselves staring down the barrel of an elimination game on Sunday night, having fallen behind three games to one against a Kansas City Royals team for which the descriptor relentless has become as familiar as gridlock on the BQE.
Such is baseball, a game whose maddeningly small margins lie at the heart of its allure.
Five outs away. That’s how near the Mets were to coming away with a 3-2 victory in Saturday night’s Game 4, and knotting the series at two games apiece with momentum to burn.
But like that, the Royals did what they’ve done seven times in 10 playoff games this month: they fought back and they won. They trailed in all three of their ALDS wins against the Astros, twice in the ALCS against the Blue Jays, and now in each of their three World Series victories so far. Six of those comebacks were from deficits of more than one run, matching the record set by the 1996 Yankees for the most in a single postseason.
“That’s what our team does,” Royals manager Ned Yost said. “We feel like if we can keep the game close, we’re going to find a way to win it. Our bullpen is so dynamic, they give us a chance to win those types of games. And it’s a team that just looks for a little crack. If we find a little crack, they’re going to make something happen.”
On Saturday night the crevasse was not immediately apparent. For more than seven innings Yost’s men had been held at bay. First by Steven Matz, the rookie left-hander and Long Island native who’s been commuting to Citi Field from his parents’ house in Stony Brook, who struck out five while facing the minimum over the first four innings, in merely his ninth major league start, before finally being chased on a Ben Zobrist double and Lorenzo Cain single in the fifth. Later by relievers Jon Niese and Bartolo Colon, the 42-year-old butterball whose strikeout of Salvador Perez with the tying run on third in a white-knuckle 10-pitch at-bat to end the sixth all but brought the house down. Then middle reliever Addison Reed, whose clean seventh pushed the Mets within touching distance of the finish.
But when bespectacled set-up man Tyler Clippard issued consecutive walks to Zobrist and Cain following an groundout by Alcides Escobar to open the eighth, and Collins called for New York closer Jeurys Familia, it was a fielding error by Daniel Murphy – the team’s offensive talisman for so much of their charmed run to the World Series – that surrendered a lead the hosts would not wrest back.
Murphy giveth, Murphy taketh away.
The second baseman’s misplay of a slow chopper by Eric Hosmer silenced the crowd as Zobrist wheeled around third for the tying run. The ensuing run-scoring singles by Cain and Perez – to stretch the score to 5-3 – seemed all but inevitable.
“They truly don’t ever stop,” Mets manager Terry Collins said. “You’ve got to make pitches and you’ve got to get outs when you have the opportunity.”
Immediately after the final outs were made on a double play made possible by a Yoenis Cespedes base-running blunder – the first line-drive twin killing to end a World Series game in 43 years – nearly all of the 44,815 spectators, many elaborately costumed, filed down the ramps and into the night with the tenor of a funeral processional. Day of the Dead, indeed. Only the pockets of blue-clad Royals fans remained, gravitating behind the visiting dugout to celebrate en masse.
“What they did tonight is what they’ve been doing the whole playoffs,” Yost said. “It’s a group of guys that have the utmost confidence in themselves. I don’t think at any point these guys thought that they were going to lose tonight. That’s just their mindset. That’s just the way that they play the game. They’re going to go out there and they’re going to find a way to win.”
On Saturday it was New York’s fielding foibles – lest we forget the Perez single in the fifth that Cespedes kicked into a double leading to Kansas City’s first run – that made it possible.
The Mets gambled on playing a weaker defensive team in the spring, and it’s cost them dearly in October.
Only six of the 45 teams who have faced a three-games-to-one deficit in the World Series have rallied to win the title, most recently the Royals themselves in 1985. It would appear the Mets – with Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard scheduled to pitch the three remaining games – would be as well positioned as any of their predecessors to repeat the feat three decades on.
“We’ve got our three guys that we’ve turned to,” Collins said. “We’re in a tough situation, but we’re not dead yet.”
Still, as October turns to November, the Mets are finding the margins are tighter than ever.
