The power of the World Series is so strong that it turned grown millionaires into children again. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning Wednesday, and the New York Mets one out from sweeping the Chicago Cubs and advancing to the World Series, the Mets started to time travel.
Manager Terry Collins, 66 years old, had never been to the Series as a player, coach, manager. Baseball had been his life, he said, since he was four. And here he was, one out from reaching the mountaintop and he wasn’t thinking strategy and possible maneuvers. Instead, he traveled back to 1960. He was 12 years old again.
“I was begging my mom to stay home and watch the World Series between the Yankees and the Pirates,” he said later, telling the story after the Mets had done it. They beat the Cubs 8-3. “And she wrote me a note to get me out of school that I was sick in the afternoon and couldn’t go back to school in the fifth grade so I could stay home. Because the World Series were all in the daytime back then, so I could stay home and watch.
“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Holy crap. Now you’re in it after all these years. It was worth the wait. It was worth all the work.’”
David Wright. The face of the Mets. He has been with them forever, through nearly reaching the Series, two collapses and dismantling of the team and at least one serious back injury. At 32, he is not the player he used to be. But with some people calling for him to be benched, he came through in the National League Championship Series, including a leaping catch that ended a Cubs’ rally Wednesday. One out from the Series, where was he?
Little League: “You think about playing in the World Series, but you don’t really think it can happen,” he said. “I mean, how many people really play in the World Series? Then in high school, you think about the World Series, but you don’t really believe it.
“I know I just said World Series a million times. World Series. The next time I play it’s going to be in the World Series. World Series. World Series.”
The Mets are back to the, well, World Series, for the first time since 2000. They’ll play Kansas City or Toronto. They haven’t won it since 1986. And there are so many hard reasons for that. You just think of all the things in baseball. Steroids and players not satisfied with the high number of millions of dollars they’re making. The Mets have disappeared partly because their owner got hung up in the Bernie Madoff scandal, for pete’s sake, and then tore down the team. As a result the Mets always stayed in the shadow of the Yankees and their great history.
And you can find yourself getting a little jaded when you weigh those things. A Mets fan can. And then you look at these grown men just becoming so vulnerable at that moment. It’s a heartening sign, a reassurance about what they’re really after.
World Series. World Series. World Series.
In the bigger picture, the Mets and the Cubs are now set up to become a great rivalry for baseball. It was the Mets’ young pitching for the Cubs’ young hitting. That bodes well for the Mets, though the Cubs will surely spend the offseason adding pitching.
When it was over, a few hundred Mets fans stayed in the stands behind the New York dugout for more than hour, waiting for the players to come back out. Chicago fan stayed, too, chanting, and then the Cubs came back out of their dugout as a team to wave.
Joe Maddon, in his first year as Cubs manager and starting four rookies, was taken to the media interview room, and he had to walk right in front of the Mets fans and through the Mets’ dugout to get there. The Mets fans cheered him and chanted his name and yelled “We’ll see you next year.”
“We were four games from the World Series,” Maddon said. “Not bad for your freshman year.”
The Mets won this by power pitching. They kept taking leads early in the games, and that takes the pressure off the pitchers. On Wednesday, they scored four runs in the first inning, and that was all they needed. The series also marked the emergence for the Mets of Daniel Murphy.
For people who don’t pay attention to baseball during the regular season, they now think that Murphy is the next Babe Ruth. He has homered in six straight postseason games, a major league record. He has hit seven postseason homers after hitting just 14 all year.
Someone told him that’s about half of his season total.
“I think that would be exactly half,” Murphy said. “I’m just teasing you. But I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It’s just a complete blessing and that’s the only way I can describe it.
“I’m surprised. Each time I put a swing on a ball and it goes out of the ballpark ... I feel like I’ve been in stretches where I’ve put good swings on balls, but they’re singles and they’re doubles. I can’t explain it. I know I’ve been up here, but it’s Jesus. I can’t explain it.”
It has been a long wait for Mets fans, years of watching their team overspend and underspend and mismanage. Wright has been there with them, defining the team’s ups and downs. Even in this series, he was playing so poorly that he was willing to sit out. Collins kept him in.
And then he came through. Every team should have a guy like this, a very, very good player, if not a great one, just feeling all the bumps and bruises of a franchise.
“It’s not about me,” he said.
Well, sure it is. It’s a new era for the Mets now, defined by young players. But the older ones traveled the most through time Wednesday. With one out left in the game – a strikeout – the older guys were the youngest Mets out there.
