PULLED OUT OF THEIR AS!
This win will make ya flip
The bat-flip police will surely have some thoughts about Asdrubal Cabrera’s epic one following his walkoff homer Thursday night, whether via social media finger-wagging or frontier justice from the opposing dugout. Whatever happens, it was a great display of spontaneous emotion, part joy and part relief. And that’s the kind of stuff this Mets team appears to feed upon. We’ll see if raw feeling can help propel them to a wild card berth, but these Mets seem to know how to cope with crushers like losing Wednesday when Ender Inciarte reached over the wall to deny Yoenis Cespedes a winning homer or how to use bursts of euphoria like the homer by “El Cabby.”
“We never put the head down,” Cabrera said after the Mets’ 9-8 victory in 11 innings. “I think that is the key for us.”
A day after the dramatic loss to the Braves, there was a lot going on in Metland, starting with the news that Steven Matz felt pain in his left shoulder, wiping out his potential start Friday and putting his season in peril. The Mets should just shut him down and let him start his winter of healing instead of floating pie-in-thesky hopes about possibly getting him ready for relief duty.
With a jolt like that to start a day where they were already vulnerable to a hangover from the previous night’s loss, would anyone have been surprised had the Mets just sagged and given away a game to the Phillies? Especially after Philadelphia took a two-run lead into the bottom of the ninth and into the bottom of the 11th? Well, maybe Terry Collins.
The manager, after all, had called a short meeting before the game, first to deliver the Matz news and then to pose a simple question — had the Mets known back when they could never seem to get going that they’d be firmly in the wild card race at this point, would they have taken it, especially considering the club’s injury woes? Of course.
So, Collins told them, “It’s a 10-day season right now. Best team gets in.”
Then they authored one of their best victories of the year. As Collins put it, “It showed. They were bound and determined to win the game and it’s a tribute to the leaders in that clubhouse, to keep everyone up.”
The manager added: “Everybody expects perfection and they don’t realize what it takes to get there and the sacrifices you make. We were in San Francisco not very long ago, two games under .500, and we’re sitting where we are today because they are resilient.
“So you roll with the punches. It’s a tough game, a long season and tonight’s game personifies exactly what the season is like, up and down, up and down, and you just have to keep playing.”
It was hard for Collins to even describe the emotional swings the last 24 or so hours have brought the Mets. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know the words. My vocabulary is not that deep, to come up with the right words.
“But I’m going to tell you, at this level, you have to be calm at all times. You’ve just got to be. You can’t get wound up in last night, all the emotion when that guy made that catch. You’ve got to be able to come back today. You can’t drain yourself.”
To even keep playing into extras, the Mets needed a ninth-inning homer from Jose Reyes, who exploded with emotion while rounding first base, saluting the Met dugout, pounding his chest as he headed toward second.
“When I was running a lot of stuff goes through my head,” Reyes said. Later, he was asked if he had a favorite regular-season homer as a Met. “This one,” he quickly replied. “Man, this one was great. We had to win this game to set the tone after the series we had against the Atlanta Braves.”
But there were more twists coming. Lucas Duda hit what looked like a potential winning homer in the 10th inning that curved just foul down the right-field line. Mets’ closer Jeurys Familia, one of a clubrecord 27 players used in the game, was charged with the tie-breaking runs and
would’ve been the losing pitcher if not for Cabrera’s blast.
Cabrera said he knew it was gone the second he hit it. He was gone, too, swept up in the emotion of the moment. He threw his bat and thrust his hands in the air, big celebration.
But on the bench, the Mets had been there before. Collins admitted the Mets in the dugout waited a tick to celebrate after what Inciarte had done to them the previous night. When it was clearly a home run, the Mets got to indulge their happiness, dumping a cooler and a bucket of bubblegum on Cabrera to commemorate the homer, a fitting way to cap an exhausting day and night.
“There’s going to be some sleeping tonight,” Collins said. Well-earned, considering how the Mets managed their swirling emotions amid playoff pressure.