Gutsy call to bullpen saves day for Mets

WASHINGTON — So you’re Terry Collins, and you have spent the entirety of your time in New York sitting square on the griddle of public opinion. You have been roasted on talk radio and roiled in the papers, and we haven’t even mentioned the way you can make Twitter rattle and hum, three and six and 10 times a game.

“That,” you say late Friday night, “is New York, isn’t it?”

This was maybe 20 minutes after you had done a most curious thing: you had walked out of the third-base dugout with the bases loaded, one out, and your team clinging to a 7-5 lead, needing a win as much as a team could possibly need a win on the 28th of April. To make this happen, you held out your hand.

Your closer, Jeurys Familia — 51 saves a year ago — handed you the ball.

In trotted Josh Edgin, carrying one career save. Standing in the Nationals’ on-deck circle was Bryce Harper, scalding hot, the most dangerous baseball player on the planet. There were 34,562 rising voices at Nationals Park, and by now the only question they had was this: bases-clearing double in the gap, or walk-off granny. Josh Edgin had another idea. “Get the ball on the ground if you can,” Edgin said.

The Mets had come into the game reeling, the Nationals soaring, 7½ games already separating them in the NL East. Jacob deGrom was brilliant, striking out a dozen over seven innings. Travis d’Arnaud had a couple of home runs off Max Scherzer, of all things, and drove in five runs, reaching 15 RBIs on the year, same as he had all of last year.

It was 5-3 for a while. Then 7-3. Then, because nothing is allowed to be easy for the Mets in April 2017, it was 7-5 entering the ninth. Familia came in. He wasn’t sharp. He allowed a single to Matt Wieters. He surrendered a single to Adam Lind. He permitted a single to Adam Eaton. Collins — who admitted: “If we’d come into this game winning seven in a row, I probably would have managed that inning a little different” — had already told his pitching coach, Dan Warthen, to get Edgin up in the event that Harper, due to hit fifth, came to the plate. Edgin wasn’t expecting that call. “Jeurys is our closer,” he said. But he hopped off the bullpen bench when the telephone rang. He got hot in a hurry. And here he came, trotting in from the pen, a ballgame in the balance, the only buffer between his manager and 12 straight hours of hot-take crucifixion.

“To me, it’s what I’m paid to do,” he said. “Sixth inning or ninth inning. Whether you’re asked to face a rookie or the best player in the game.”

Edgin threw ball one. Harper fouled one off.

D’Arnaud called for a cutter.

“A little bit harder than his slider,” he explained.

Harper swung. As great as he has been going, as beautiful a player as he is, it really does feel that every time Harper uncorks a swing he’s going to send a ball screaming across state lines. Even his swings and misses are majestic. This time, his mighty pass at the ball yielded a slow ground ball right at Edgin.

“Please make a good throw,” Collins said, to no one and to everyone.

Edgin did that, getting the force at home. Now it was d’Arnaud’s turn.

“As long as I make a good throw, I know I’ve done all I can do there,” d’Arnaud said. “If he beats it, he beats it.”

If he had beaten it, the bases would have remained loaded and Collins would have taken Edgin out of the game, he would have summoned Fernando Salas to face Ryan Zimmerman (who already had homered twice), and the knob on that griddle would have spiked the temperature from 500 degrees to a thousand, as shaky as Salas has looked lately.

But he didn’t beat it. The ball smacked in T.J. Rivera’s glove. The Mets stormed from the bench. This one win wouldn’t fix much, they are still 6 ½ games behind, still four games under .500, still with so many issues to repair. But winning, according to sources, surely beats losing. You have to start somewhere.

You’re Terry Collins, and damned if it didn’t work out for you this time.

“That’s a big weight off our shoulders,” you said, and it sure looked from up close like your own shoulders were feeling strong and true for a change.