The Game

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” — Prospero, The Tempest

In for a penny, in for a pound. The Mets finished off their late-season train wreck in suitably spectacular style, giving it up quicker than a prison bitch and losing 8-1 to the Marlins. It was a classic choke job, the kind where the last-place team scores seven in their first at bat, while the first-place team leaves a boatload of men on base early before phoning it in late. Having watched the death throes for so long, the final pulling of the plug came not a moment too soon. No grief — just relief.

Much relief to see the last of Tom Glavine, who deserves a special circle in Hell where he’s forced to watch a 40-something lefty nibble at the outside corner for 200 innings a year. Maybe Tom got squeezed by the ump, maybe some of the Florida hits were bleeders, maybe the defense wasn’t great. But these multiple mishaps victimize pitchers of all stripes. The difference is that the guy who only strikes out 4 per 9 doesn’t have any way to put a lid on the pot before it boils over and starts a five-run grease fire. Glavine’s idea of getting tough is to refuse to throw strikes. Interesting strategy. Crafty.

Crafty like witchcraft? It did seem like the Mets were playing under a hex for the last few weeks — or was it just the pressure of having every baseball fan in the country waiting for the other shoe to drop? Whatever the cause, New York played scared; scared, cautious, and sloppy. Oliver Perez is wild, but hitting three batters in one inning Friday? The team making 21 errors in 17 games? Glavine threw wild trying to get a runner at third yesterday — Tommy never makes errors. The steady drumbeat from the tabloids and talk radio, the constant comparisons to the ‘64 Phillies — the final flop was a foregone conclusion, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It couldn’t not happen.

And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Some years you just miss the playoffs and console yourself that you didn’t have the horses to go all the way anyhow. In spite of the collapse, the 2007 Mets could have done real damage in the postseason. A four-dude rotation of Pedro Martinez, Oliver Perez, John Maine, and Glavine, with El Duque set to bail out Tommy when he wobbles? Beats what the last two winners had. Some of the bats had off years, but you could still imagine Moises Alou cracking a big homer, David Wright hitting everything in sight while atoning for his 2006 NLCS fizzle, Carlos Gomez pulling an Endy Chavez with a game-saving grab. You could imagine all those things, but now you probably shouldn’t.

Nagging questions always remain; why did it happen, and who was to blame? You can’t fault guys like Shawn Green and Paul Lo Duca; their numbers were lame, but that’s because they are lame; they’re not writing their own names into the lineup card. Ramon Castro started 34 games and hit 11 homers; what more did he need to do to win some more of Lo Duca’s at bats? (Castro just missed a first-inning grand slam yesterday that would’ve put the Mets back in the game — would he have had a quicker bat if he’d seen action more than once a week?) Forget Luis Castillo — Ruben Gotay was hitting .350 and he couldn’t displace a 37-year-old mustache man playing on one leg.

The indictments against the organizational over-reliance on Proven Veterans are everywhere. Lastings Milledge is Gary Sheffield waiting to happen, but he rides the pine in favor of Green and Chavez, who don’t help you even if they’re hitting .300. A retread like Brian Lawrence gets six starts, and the Mets lose five, including games to Philly and San Diego. Guillermo Mota gets called into 52 games, long after he’s shown his true colors; in a parallel universe, the 8th-inning man is a guy called Philip, and baseball fans everywhere memorize the Humber Rules.

So blame Willie Randolph. Blame Omar Minaya. Blame the Wilpon boys while you’re there. But you can’t really fault the players — except for that one guy. Jose Reyes somehow got it into his head that this was the year he would steal 100 bases. He made 99 tries, got caught 21 times, and ran himself so far into the ground that every aspect of his game was in shambles just when the team needed him most. A wise man pointed out earlier this year that any shortstop who tries to steal 100 bases is going to be running on fumes come July. That wise man? Jimmy Rollins.

It’s going to be a long winter, folks.

The Haiku

Terrific: Not Tom
Mets let season slip away
Team to beat wasn’t

The Boxscore

The Credits

Recap by David Simons
Haiku by Howard Megdal