ATLANTA — Over the final two innings of the 2,428th game of this major league season, a Russian novel broke out. Heroes and goats, and goats who became heroes, and plot twists and enough themes to fill six seasons of a streaming series.
In the end, to finally slay their horrors in this city — horrors that president of baseball operations David Stearns admitted needed to be eviscerated — the Mets needed arguably the biggest homer in franchise history to register their most important regular-season victory ever.
All of that made this Mets season a success. Of course, they want more. No Met was speaking as if this journey were complete, though they are going to have to go from 18 innings and overwrought emotions and champagne and cigars and another flight to face the Brewers on Tuesday in the Wild Card Series in less than 24 hours.
But from where they were, at 0-5 and a May dive that felt like the same old Mets, and right through an eighth inning Monday afternoon in which they reached their highest highs and lowest lows multiple times within about 50 minutes, the Mets found the talent and temerity to assure they will be in Milwaukee — for October baseball.
The Mets beat the Braves, 8-7, in the next-to-last game of this regular season. But “won” is an inadequate verb for what transpired over three hours in the first game of a doubleheader — a twin bill baked into the Russian novel since it came wrapped in controversy about how it was derived. And that it came a day after the regular season was supposed to conclude and left the Mets with a scenario in which one win gets them in and two losses would have brought anguish.
“You could write a book,” Carlos Mendoza said about the day.
The Mets survived being overwhelmed by a new Braves-clad Mets killer named Spencer Schwellenbach, who feels like someone Chipper Jones and John Smoltz conjured in a laboratory to make Mets lives miserable for a decade or so. They overcame in this city, which has served as a torture chamber even as the Braves bounced from one stadium to another over the past quarter century. And they emerged from a final two innings that seemed to be their wildly fluctuating season on 10 Red Bulls.
“I’m not sure I could come up with one [regular-season win in team history] that tops this in terms of both the ups and downs or what it meant to do this [in Atlanta],” said Stearns, who grew up a Mets fan. “It was important for us to do this here, and frankly, who did it at the end — to have Francisco come through like that, it’s kind of the way it should be.”
All it took was a six-run top of the eighth inning in which the Mets delivered one pressurized huge at-bat after another. And a ninth inning in which Lindor produced a homer that can get you into an all-time Mets discussion about biggest ever against Todd Pratt walking the Diamondbacks out of the playoffs and Ray Knight in 1986 World Series Game 7 and Mike Piazza after 9/11 and a few others. A homer that Brandon Nimmo called “an exclamation point on Francisco’s season.”
The drama elevated because Lindor is culminating perhaps the best Mets individual position player season ever with a bad back, and because the Mets were two outs away from having to play a win-or-go-home Game 162 that would have greatly diminished their chances — even with a finale victory — of doing anything in the playoffs.
And even after Lindor lifted a team with a Kirk Gibson Lite moment, it was not over. Edwin Diaz had endured an eighth-inning meltdown of failing to cover first base and then allowing four runs to score for a 7-6 Atlanta lead. Diaz had been told by pitching coach Jeremy Hefner that he was out of the game, but when Lindor homered, he told Mendoza, no way, he was going back out. He blew a save. He would not blow redemption. So Diaz, who threw 26 pitches Sunday, wound up needing 40 more Monday — tying his career high — to cement the Mets’ 89th win.
“This team gave me so much and they trusted me,” Diaz said. “I didn’t want to be the guy who screwed up. I want to fight for this team.”
Understand the implications here. Losing would have meant — among other things — forcing Lindor to play 18 innings Monday and Luis Severino to start the nightcap while further draining the bullpen. So even a Game 2 win would leave the Mets spent and needing a bullpen game to open the playoffs Tuesday. So the opener was pretty much a playoff game for both teams.
And the Mets won it. Their biggest regular-season triumph ever, in a city that Stearns knew historically had “been a miserable place” for the organization. A Mets season did not die here. It was reborn in what Nimmo called “an unbelievable roller coaster.”
“We believe, we believe,” Lindor said. “I said from Day 1, we have the team to do special things.”
