LOS ANGELES – The Mets have had themselves a hell of a week so far. They’ve played loose, they’ve played with confidence, they’ve established with vengeance that they are a better team than the Dodgers, a more complete team, a deeper team.
You couldn’t ask for a better blueprint across their first 18 innings of October.
Now, tonight, they get the opportunity to establish that they have the most important chamber of a championship heart. There are a lot of teams that are capable of all manner of heroics early in a short series. Starting well isn’t the trick.
Closing is.
“Coffee is for closers,” goes the famous line from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but tonight the Mets seek something far more meaningful than a venti double-shot latte. The very best teams are tough to beat when the series is up for grabs, and impossible to beat when their cleats are on the other team’s necks. That’s where the Mets find themselves tonight. It’s an enviable position.
But not a guaranteed one. Not until they do it.
Champagne is for closers, too.
“The one thing we have to remember,” Dodgers manager Grady Little said the other night, after the Mets had seized a 2-0 advantage in this best-of-five Division Series, “is that we may be in a tight spot, but we haven’t been eliminated yet.” Little knows all about that, of course. Three years ago, when he was managing the Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics had the Sox staring at the abyss, up two games to none, into extra innings in Game 3, and the A’s let the Sox slither free. Then they had a lead near the end of Game 4; the Sox came back again. In Game 5, the A’s had a lead early and a rally late, and Derek Lowe shut the door on them.
It was a lesson it took the A’s an impossibly long time to learn, one that finally hit home for them yesterday in the sunshine of Oakland.
Since 2000 the A’s had nine different chances to close out a series, and they were 0-for-9.
That’s enough to destroy the lining of a baseball fan’s stomach.
“You can’t wait around for things to happen to you,” Willie Randolph said last night. “Sometimes, you have to go out and seize the day.” Randolph knows, as well as anybody, because when he was in the employ of the Yankees during their championship seasons, the Yankees were killers as closers.
They may well, in fact, have been the most dominant closers in the history of the sport.
During their four most recent championship seasons 1996, and 1998-2000 – the Yankees played 13 games in which they had the opportunity to close out their opponent. They won an astonishing 12 of those games. It may well be that the ultimate difference between title and torment is the ability to kill teams when they are gasping. The Yankees failed twice to do that against the Indians in 1997, twice more against the Diamondbacks in 2001, and three times the first team ever to do that, in case you’ve forgotten against the Red Sox in 2003.
“Our best teams,” Joe Torre said earlier this summer, “always get that look in their eyes like they know they have a team vulnerable, and it’s time to pounce.” The Mets needn’t look at anyone else’s history to see the benefits of taking care of business quickly. The two times they’ve won championships, in 1969 and 1986, they played four games with the opportunity to close out the Braves, Orioles, Astros and Red Sox, and they won all four of them.
They have already done so many things right. They haven’t been near as tightly wound as their fans were entering October.
They looked like the class of the National League during the season’s six months, and nothing anyone’s seen across the past six days should change that opinion one bit. There’s just one thing left to prove.
Champagne is for closers.