HAPPY BERTH DAY
Jeurys Familia hugs catcher Travis d’Arnaud after closing out a 5-3 win Saturday in Philadelphia, clinching a wild-card spot for the Mets. The Amazin’s will play host to a do-or-die clash Wednesday against the Cardinals or Giants.
PHILADELPHIA — For some of the Mets, this was a familiar feeling, the thrill that swelled in their throat and moistened their eyes at exactly 4:08 p.m. when a broken-bat flare died in Michael Conforto’s glove in left field, securing an 87th victory, clinching a playoff slot for the second year in a row, guaranteeing a baseball game Wednesday night at Citi Field. The manager, for one. “There’s nothing like this,” Terry Collins said in the visiting manager’s office at Citizens Bank Park, maybe 20 minutes after the Mets had beaten the Phillies, 5-3. “This is why you play.”
His cell phone was jangling with calls and texts, the usual assortment of greetings from all over the country, all across his 45 years in baseball. He was sopping wet, thanks to five of his especially exuberant players who had emptied the equivalent of a 12-pack of Budweiser over his head a few minutes earlier. His hat read: “POSTSEASON 2016.” His T-shirt read: “MADE FOR OCTOBER.”
His face read: “LET’S START THE PLAYOFFS IMMEDIATELY.”
“If you’re going to play in our town,” said Terry Collins of Midland, Mich., and lately of Flushing, N.Y., “you’d better have heart and you’d better have character. And this team has plenty of both.”
For some of them this was an old feeling, one they never believed they ever would know again. A year ago, Jose Reyes watched his old team make it all the way to the World Series.
Though they were there, Reyes and his wife took a trip to Hawaii, and there was an incident between them, serious enough that MLB suspended Reyes for two months for violating the sport’s domesticabuse policy, grave enough that had Reyes never played another inning, the sport would not have thought twice about it.
Instead, the Mets offered to bring him back home, convinced he was penitent, sold that he understood that he was on his last chance. Ten years ago, Reyes had been the 23year-old laughing face of the team’s rise to the NLCS, and he believed, as so many did, that the good times would last forever in Queens.
“Now,” Reyes said Saturday, also dripping beer and champagne from the brim of his celebratory cap, “I’m at the end of my career. This is so hard to explain. When I asked my agent to see if the Mets would have me back, I couldn’t know it would be like this. But to be a part of this, now?” He shook his head.
“To come from where we were as a team — and from where I was — this is just incredible,” he said.
For some of them this was a brand-new feeling, bordering on surreal, bordering on fantasy. There were 39 players jammed into the visiting clubhouse, celebrating, reveling, and most of them were kids who had spent most of the season in Las Vegas — kids with high uniform numbers and formerly unfamiliar names like Lugo and Gsellman and Smoker, Kelly and Cecchini and Reynolds.
T.J. Rivera was part of that anonymous pile of names, happy just to draw big league meal money after wandering six years in the minor league wilderness, and there he may have stayed but for a fateful night in Washington. That night he showed up for work, spotted his name in the lineup, and hit a game-winning home run in he 10th inning, winning one of the 15 or 20 had-to-have-it games that littered the final few weeks of the season.
And from there, you couldn’t keep him off the field with a court order. He had another hit and another RBI, the kid who hit .324 in over 2,400 minor league at-bats now hitting .333 as a Met. Two months ago, he wondered if he ever would get his call to The Show. Wednesday night, this son of The Bronx will start in a wild-card playoff game in Queens. Who had that one in the pool, you? Anyone?
“We feel like we’ve done so much,” Rivera said, “but also that we have so much more to do. And to be a part of this? A part of what’s coming Wednesday?”
He laughed, because what else do you say? What else do you do? The carpet was soaked. The beer was empty. The day was full. And a second season awaits. Nothing like this. This is why you play.