So this is how it all happened on the day when the Mets punched their ticket back to the postseason, after one of the most exciting regular seasons they’ve ever had, all the way back to Tom Seaver: Francisco Lindor, who is every bit the MVP of the National League as Shohei Ohtani is, whose team would have been nowhere near a day like this without him, saw his bad back get better just in time for him to put the 2024 Mets on it one more time. But maybe not the last time.
You know by now what else happened at the end of one of the biggest and most important games the Mets have played. They were losing, 3-0, to the Braves in the top of the eighth in Atlanta, because it always has to be Atlanta and the Braves for the Mets. Only then they rang the Braves up for six runs in the bottom of the eighth to take the lead that really did put them six outs away from the postseason after being 22-33 at the end of May.
But, of course, these are the Mets, even when they are such a different kind of Mets team, and so heartbreak is always just around the corner, or about to step into the batter’s box. So it was on Monday afternoon, because before long Edwin Diaz wasn’t covering first base and then Ozzie Albies was clearing the bases with a double and just like that it was as if many bad parts of the Mets-Braves past had come rolling into Truist Park the way the storm did last week, the one that had pushed this doubleheader to Monday.
Now the Mets weren’t six outs away from October. They were about to be three outs away from losing this game and facing the prospect of losing their season if they lost the second game of this doubleheader. This did have a chance to be a heartbreak day at the end of what would have turned into a heartbreak season for the Mets if the whole doubleheader ended up going all the way off the rails.
It would not. Because of Francisco Lindor.
He is the star of this team and the leader of this team, a player who has become one of the best leaders in the sport, and he came up in the top of the ninth with Starling Marte on base and hit one over the wall in right-center and now it was 8-7, Mets in Atlanta. Now this game had become the Mets season, because they had gotten up one more time after having just gotten flattened — or so we thought — in the bottom of the eighth. Now Lindor had made one of those swings that will be a part of Mets history, whatever happens in the first round of the playoffs, or beyond.
Still outs to get. I thought the Mets would have a better chance with Jesse Orosco pitching the bottom of the ninth against the Braves after the way Diaz had turned the bottom of the eighth into a theme park. But he had managed to get out of the inning, somehow. Somehow he managed to strand Albies at second by striking out Marcell Ozuna, the Braves’ best hitter and best player this season after Ronald Acuna, Jr. was lost to a knee injury. Diaz got Ozuna to chase a 3-2 pitch and the Mets were still only one run down in Atlanta, with their most important at-bats of this season coming up.
Diaz was supposed to be out of the game by then. Done for the game and done for the day and maybe done for the season if the Mets lost Game 1 and then did the same in Game 2, which would certainly have been in play after the way Game 1 was ending. But the Mets closer went to the Mets manager and pleaded his case to stay in there.
“Don’t take me out,” Edwin Diaz said to Carlos Mendoza. “I got this.”
Diaz said: “I’m going back out. I don’t care what you say, I’m going back out. I got this s—t.”
Mendoza had made so many tough calls and so many right calls this season, as he got the Mets through the tough times in May and then saw them turn around and have the best record in the sport for the next four months. Now he was going to ride with Theme Park Ride Diaz. The Mets would go to the playoffs or Mendoza would be known for having the kind of Grady Little moment the old Red Sox manager did in Game 7 of the ALCS between Little’s Red Sox and the Yankees when the Red Sox manager stayed too long with Pedro Martinez.
Diaz did give up a hit in the ninth. The Braves did get the tying run to second. Finally it was Diaz against an old Met named Travis d’Arnaud, and d’Arnaud was hitting a ground ball to Francisco Lindor. Who else? Then it was over in Atlanta, even with the second game left to be played, and the Mets still not knowing whether they were going to be playing Game 1 in San Diego or Milwaukee.
The Mets had survived. And advanced. That old thing. On the field when it was over Brandon Nimmo, who had hit a bomb in the top of the eighth that looked to give the Mets enough of a lead until it wasn’t enough of a lead, said, “This is better than (making the postseason in 2022) because of everything we had to overcome.”
When Steve Gelb of SNY spoke on the field with Lindor, he asked what this game meant, and the way it had ended, with his home run swing coming before Diaz was spiking his glove the way old Jesse had once tossed his in the air, Lindor had the perfect answer, after this perfect ending.
“It means we are one step closer to where we want to be,” he said.
He didn’t add “OMG.” Didn’t have to on this day. The rest of us had said it already.
