HE HAD already done the job he’s paid to do, striking out Tino Martinez and Jorge Posada in the top of the seventh inning. He had already provided a “Holy %#@#!” moment to end all “Holy %#@#!” moments a few moments earlier, pummeling a Randy Johnson fastball over Bernie Williams’ head in center field.
It had already been a pretty full day for Dae-Sung Koo, and it was only the warm-up, only the appetizer. Because now Koo was running toward home plate, a slow streak of blue, and it was as if Shea Stadium had risen as one, all 55,800 people clearing their throats and joining in the same stunned chorus:
“HOLY %#@#!”
The Mets were clinging to a 2-0 lead, just hoping to sneak across the finish line and get a game off the Yankees. Jose Reyes had laid down a perfect bunt, and Yankees catcher Jorge Posada had flipped it to first, abandoning home plate for either Tino Martinez, Randy Johnson or Alex Rodriguez to cover.
None of them did. Koo saw that.
“And I thought I could make it,” Mr. Koo said.
He thought he could make it. Of course he did. Let that stand as the valedictory address for these Mets, then, almost seven weeks into a season that has been alternately frustrating and feisty and flabbergasting and fabulous, but never, ever, ever dull.
Maybe it’s hard to keep a straight face to praise a team with a payroll north of $100 million for making baseball interesting in Flushing again, but that’s precisely what the Mets have done so far. Every day is an adventure, every game a labyrinth. Sometimes they figure it out, sometimes they don’t. But they demand that you talk about them afterward. Art Howe’s milquetoast ghost has officially been exorcised.
And life lives in Shea now.
So here came Dae-Sung Koo, and it was a wonderfully absurd play, a ridiculous play, yet another “Holy %#@#!” play, but he was coming and nothing was going to stop him. Robinson Cano could hardly believe what he was seeing, but finally he fired the ball to Posada, who hastened his retreat, who dove at Koo, making his own dive toward the dish. And beat him there, too, by the way.
Only umpire Chuck Meriwether didn’t see it that way. He extended his arms. He permitted this perfectly preposterous play to reach its proper conclusion.
“If the umpire says a man is safe,” Koo reasoned, “that means he is safe.”
Koo emerged from a cloud of dust to receive a dugout stuffed with wildly celebratory Mets. It was 3-0. Johnson would be gone soon, the Yankees to follow, and the Mets would savor this 7-1 victory for as long as the law allowed. “It looked like he was running in quicksand,” is how David Wright, the kid third baseman, described Koo’s baserunning.
“He was just laying in the weeds,” said Willie Randolph, the normally stoic manager who just couldn’t keep a straight face postgame, not after seeing what he saw, not after Koo did what he did.
These are good days at Shea, no matter how this season plays itself out, no matter if Randolph can keep stitching together enough wins to keep his team in play for a postseason berth. The Yankees will win more games, and they will win them in their usual dour, professional way. Nothing to apologize for there. That works for them, has for the better part of nine decades.
The Mets have never won that way; they didn’t win that nickname, “Amazin’s,” in a lottery, after all. When they win, you need a defibrillator by your side. It’s always been that way. It’s that way now. It wasn’t Mookie Wilson nudging a ball through Bill Buckner’s legs this time, or a black cat taunting Leo Durocher.
This time it was Dae-Sung Koo – who earlier in the week had watched three Todd Coffey strikes sail by him while standing so far away from home plate he could have been taking tolls on the Triborough – who beat the Yankees with his arm, his bat and his legs.
Yeah. You can say that again.
Holy %#@#!