OF COURSE there had to be a pop-up. One more Friday night at Yankee Stadium, one more bottom of the ninth inning, Yankees fans nudged to the edges of their seats, Mets fans hiding their eyes with shaking hands, Francisco Rodriguez dealing, turning, pointing to the ball in the black night sky and .¤.¤.
“I don’t know if you guys noticed,” the Mets closer said a bit later, laughing, “but I didn’t start to celebrate until he caught it.”
It was a sound plan, all things considered, even as the ball skied off Nick Swisher’s bat, even as it drifted into foul territory, even as David Wright drew a bead on it and even as it landed softly and securely in his mitt, the final out of a 4-0 Mets victory that extended their winning streak to eight, kept them even with the Braves in the loss column atop the NL East standings and moved them alone into first in the wild-card standings.
Even as it made for one hell of an exhale.
It is one of the charms of this team, an inherent inability to hardly ever play a laugher. The Yankees were dead, their stadium empty, their workday seemingly over, and still there was time for theatrics.
Still there was time for drama.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, right?” Rodriguez said.
This is the beauty of rolling hot dice, of course. There is no such thing as second-guessing a winning hand, no matter how ridiculous the process of building it might have been. The first six or seven years that Joe Torre managed the Yankees, he was like Richard Dreyfuss in “Let It Ride,” hitting every daily double, every trifecta, every hunch, every lark. When it works, they call you “coy,” or “gutsy,” they say you manage with your heart and your stomach.
When it doesn’t, they call you a broadcaster or a bench coach soon enough.
Jerry Manuel has flaming-hot cards in his hands now, he hits every inside straight and wins every double-down. If he makes an odd-looking lineup change, it works. If he makes a batting order switch, it works. Last night, after managing the sixth, seventh and eighth innings as if he were managing a play-in game, he decided to go with Raul Valdes to start the ninth in a 4-0 game, acting as if he were suddenly hosting an open-mike night.
“I wanted to give Frankie a blow if I could,” Manuel said, talking about how much he’d been using him lately, talking about wanting to save a few drops of gas in the tank if he could. And this would make perfect sense except that K-Rod had already warmed up, so the notion of giving him a night off already was gone. Sure, he wouldn’t have been walking into a save situation, but this was a Yankees game, this was a chance to close out their struggling but ever-potent cross-town rivals.
“You always prefer to go in the game once you’re hot,” Rodriguez said.
But in came Valdes and out to the bases went Yankees — Francisco Cervelli singling, Curtis Granderson singling, and soon K-Rod was up again, tossing five or six warm-ups, and into the game he came. Suddenly it was very much a game, a save situation, a rousted opponent and a suddenly re-interested crowd, and soon the bases were loaded.
It was, let’s say, a curious bit of strategy.
And when the baseball tumbled through the air at the end, and when it finally landed in Wright’s glove, it didn’t matter. It had worked. The Mets had won for the eighth straight game, for the seventh straight time on the road, for the 12th time in 13 games. That is officially a roll.
“When things are going good,” Manuel said, “you want to keep it going. You don’t want to let a loss sneak in and lead you to your next streak.”
It was a curious thing to say, a fan’s thing to say, a departure from the usual manager mantra of focusing on today, forgetting yesterday, blocking out tomorrow. It may well be the wrong way to think. But are you going to tell him that, the way things are breaking for him now?