You would think that after three championships in five years, the Giants would look at wild-card qualification with a jaundiced eye and a practiced yawn. You would be wrong. The home-team clubhouse at AT&T Park on Sunday looked suspiciously similar to the visiting clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday.
“The torture of baseball,” is what Hunter Pence called it, wiping his hair and his beard of the beer and the champagne with which it had been soaked a few moments before. “And we’ve survived, so far.”
Yes, this is what will arrive at Citi Field on Wednesday night for the NL wild-card game: a team that has not only owned the decade so far, but owned the weekend, too. We have spent so much of the past few weeks celebrating the Mets for their relentless, single-minded pursuit of a wild-card spot, and rightly so: from 60-62, they had to go 27-12 before clinching in Game 161 in Philadelphia.
But they will not be the hottest team in Queens on Wednesday.
That will be the Giants, who after they lost last Wednesday to the Rockies, were told by their manager, Bruce Bochy, that they probably would have to win out in order to make sure they’d keep their season alive. That meant going 4-0, which meant winning three games against their rivals from Los Angeles (who were throwing both Rich Hill and Clayton Kershaw).
Which is precisely what they did.
“I just had a sense that we had to be perfect,” Bochy said when the 7-1 win over the Dodgers was complete Sunday, “because I knew nothing would come easy and I knew the Mets and the Cardinals weren’t going to help us out.”
The Mets didn’t, winning twice before throwing a C lineup at the Phillies on Sunday. And the Cardinals didn’t, parlaying the momentum accrued from Thursday night’s controversial win over the Reds into a three-game sweep of the Pirates, capped by a 10-4 thrashing Sunday. So the Giants really did have to be perfect. They really needed 4-0 to avoid a tiebreaker Monday in St. Louis.
Perfect they were. Four-and-oh they were.
New York-bound they are.
“And we can fly right over St. Louis now, instead of stopping there,” Pence said.
On television, calling the last inning of his 66-year career, Vin Scully said, in the moments before Sergio Romo induced a weak fly ball to left field by Rob Segedin: “The Giants are thrilled to their core. Their fans are ecstatic. This crowd is bursting at the seams right now.”
And they were, team and crowd both, the three-time champs and the fan base that has sold out the ballpark by McCovey Cove 489 consecutive times. The players lingered when it was over, changing into the same caps and the same T-shirts the Mets had a day earlier, and they hung around to toss baseballs into the crowd, Jake Peavy taking a microphone and saying, “It didn’t look good for a while. Fans were ready to jump off their handlebars.”
They seemed cool. They seemed eager to act like they’ve been there before, which in recent years they have been, more often than any other team in the sport.
Then they were in the clubhouse, and the corks were popping, and the lager was flowing, and suddenly they seemed to remember just how dire things had seemed for them these past two months, the bullpen blowing game after game, the record for the 68 games connecting July 15 and Sept. 28 a ghastly 26-42.
Before going 4-0 over the final four.
And that’s when the party really started. And that’s when the irony became clear: after spending months chasing the Giants (among others) it was the Mets being chased in the season’s final days, the chasing continuing all the way to Wednesday, just past 8 o’clock, the defending NL champs hosting the three-time world champs.
“I’m not done playing at this ballpark this year!” Peavy crowed at the crowd.
“We’re ready,” outfielder and ex-Met Angel Pagan said. “This is our time of year.”
“When it comes to October,” first baseman Brandon Belt said, “there’s no team better than us.”
“The goal is getting in,” Romo said. “We like our chances once we get there.”
It’s true, of course, all of it. The Giants have been October darlings in every even-numbered year since 2010, and their latest journey begins Wednesday night at Citi Field, which is perfect since the Mets’ own journey for redemption was launched on Aug. 20 at AT&T, when they beat the Giants to move to 61-62 and start the long way back.
Two teams left on the side of the highway, now facing a collision course. Yeah. Wednesday night can’t get here soon enough.