Dan's Papers - October 5, 2007 - A Cry In The Afternoon From A Mets Fan

I ran some errands on Saturday afternoon. At the teller's window at the North Fork Bank in East Hampton, I overheard somebody ask the score.

"Still Washington 1, Philadelphia 0," was the reply.

Driving down Newtown Lane, looking through the glass front of the Cittanuova Restaurant, I could see what was on the three flat screen TVs over the bar. They were all the same. Washington vs. Philadelphia. And there were big crowds standing watching them.

I stopped into North Main Street Dry Cleaners. The game was on the radio in the back. Frank Cafiso came to the front counter.

"What's the score?" I asked.

"Washington just scored two more," he said. "It's 4 to 1."

Of course, I was recording the game on my TV at home while I was running my errands, so I could watch it later. I never in my wildest dreams expected I would be watching these two completely unknown teams, to me anyway, play a game of baseball. But there it was. On channel 5, pre-empting whatever else might have been on that afternoon. If Philadelphia won, the Mets would be done for the year. If they lost, the Mets could come back and still win the conference title on Sunday.

And so, when I got home, I watched most of the Philadelphia vs. Washington game, fast forwarding through commercials, watching players I had never seen play before, rooting so hard for this new expansion team - the remains of the hapless and bankrupt Montreal Expos. Going into the bottom of the ninth, Washington was still in the lead 4 to 2.

"Forty seven times this year, the Phillies have come back to win late in their games," the announcer said. "They did this more than any other team in baseball this year."

And then the time span I was recording on my TV ran out. And I went berserk.

So I never could see it. But I did pick up the score - the game had been over for two hours - on my Blackberry. Final score, Washington 4, Philadelphia 2. It would all be decided on Sunday.

Sunday at 1:10 p.m., I settled into my chair to watch the Mets win the pennant. They had Tom Glavine, their Cy Young Winner, on the mound. They had a crowd of 45,000 fans, standing room only. They had 10 million people around the country watching it, and they had the same last place team in front of them that they had walloped the day before. If they could win, and I was sure they could, and if Philadelphia were to lose to Washington again, the Mets would be Conference Champs and would go for the pennant.

And so it began. Glavine walked the lead off batter. But something I saw made me sit up straight on the sofa. Glavine was pitching without oomph. He was lobbing the ball over the plate. They had a radar gun. The speed of the pitches, as the first batter watched them go by, were 74 miles per hour, 81 miles per hour and 77 miles per hour on my television screen.

"Look at this," I said to my girlfriend. "I think there is something wrong with the radar gun. These pitches are almost twenty miles too slow."

She nodded. Very strange.

The next batter hit a sacrifice fly, moving the man on first to second. The next batter singled to right. The next batter singled to second. The next batter doubled to deep right. And when the throw came in, Glavine cut it off and threw it over the head of the catcher for a fielding error.

At this point, the score was 4-0, Florida.

The next batter singled. The next batter walked. The next batter singled to left center. And the next batter walked. The next batter got to first base after Glavine hit him in the chest, and that was all for Glavine. Now it was 5-0 and the bases were loaded.

Glavine was relieved by pitcher Jorge Sosa. When the smoke cleared, it was the end of the top of the first and the score was 7-0. You'd have thought the crowd was attending a funeral, and everybody knew that was the end of the season for the Mets.

It was the single worst pitching performance I had ever seen. Glavine, lobbing the ball over the plate, had given up 7 runs in 1/3 of an inning, which is an earned run average of 189.00. He also had an error and hit a batter. I don't think it gets much worse than that.

Because I had taped it, I asked my girlfriend to watch Glavine pitch one of his lobs. I fast-backwarded it, and there it was. This lackadaisical pitch. And then I fast-forwarded and you could watch Sosa whip around and blaze a fastball in at 92 miles an hour. The speed gun was not broken after all. And yet, this disparity was never even mentioned for the rest of this ridiculous game, which brought the Mets down in flames, or the next day when you could read what the sportswriters had to say about this debacle. Glavine is a location pitcher, which means he doesn't blaze in his fastballs. He was interviewed. He said he was disappointed in his performance. Nice guy, is what I thought.

In their final 17 games, the Mets managed to win only 5. They had been in first place for five of the six months of the season, and lost it for good only on the last day. It was the biggest meltdown in the history of baseball. And the Mets were out of the playoffs. What a bummer.