The Mets had picked a hell of a time to bury their bats in the weeds. This side of the border, that side of the border: didn’t matter. The Mets had 13 hits over the course of 28 innings. They had one extra-base hit in that span.
And the last eight of those innings?
A 28-year-old kid making his 11th career start named Bowden Francis had mowed them down like blades of grass under a Toro. The Mets needed this game, that was non-negotiable, but they couldn’t touch Francis. They’d gone down on six pitches in the eighth. The Diamondbacks were already way ahead in Phoenix. The Braves were ready to tee up the Nats in Washington.
The Mets were in a pretty bad fix.
“Everything went his way,” Francisco Lindor said. “Until the last pitch he threw.”
Francis, a split-finger specialist, had just befuddled Lindor with his best ones of the day. It was 0-and-2. There were plenty of Mets fans at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, but they were drowned out by the others among the 29,399 who knew they were three outs away from witnessing history. Brian Serven called for a fastball, and hoped Francis would throw it around chin level.
It was waist level. The last pitch Francis threw, Lindor turned around that fastball — turned around the game, too, and maybe the Mets playoff hopes — and launched it 398 feet. It tied the game at 1. It transformed the Mets dugout into a first-grade gym class, two dozen players jumping, leaping over the railing, flailing the air.
“Once Lindor hit that ball,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said, “you could feel something change. You could sense it.”
Said Lindor: “The vibes in the dugout just lifted.”
What happened next was almost inevitable. The Mets loaded the bases. Pete Alonso and Starling Marte socked sacrifice flies. Francisco Alvarez crushed a three-run homer 439 feet to dead center. And Ryne Stanek and Edwin Diaz closed out the Jays. The Mets won, 6-2, and kept their feet solidly on the “in” side of playoff position.
And they did it by winning the kind of game teams touched by pixie dust seem to win (and later, the Braves helped by getting slapped around by the Nats). It’s funny. For much of the day, we were prepared to remind you that twice in the Mets’ history, in years they’d made the postseason, they’d been no-hit in the final weeks of a season: in 1969 (by Pittsburgh’s Bob Moose) and in 2015 (by Washington’s Max Scherzer).
Instead, we will go back to another night late in 1969, Sept. 15 in St. Louis, when Steve Carlton set a major league record by striking out 19 Mets — yet the Mets won the game, 4-3, because Ron Swoboda hit two-run home runs in the fourth and eighth innings. Pixie-dust game. Just like this one.
Nick Turchiaro-Imagn Images
“My home run was only big because we wound up winning the game,” Lindor said. “It got us going.”
It also provided two immediate and altogether compelling pieces of testimony. For one: at some point soon, preferably over the winter, Lindor should be named the Mets captain. On that ballot he will run unopposed.
On the other? Well, let’s just say this didn’t hurt his chances in the long-shot campaign to convince enough MVP voters to ignore the fact Shohei Ohtani entered Wednesday night four home runs and three stolen bases shy of founding the 50/50 club. All Lindor can do is keep collecting moments like this one, which leave his teammates alternately shaking their heads and pumping their fists, all of them hitching a ride to Lindor’s star.
And you know something? It didn’t end there. Later, talking to SNY’s Steve Gelbs, Lindor said, ever mindful of the date: “Today we’re playing for the fire department and the police department, all the people that actually have hard jobs in life. My problems in baseball are distant. So thank you to all who take care of us and much love.”
Love is not in short supply around Lindor, not in the Mets clubhouse, not on the team charter that flew them from Toronto to Philadelphia to enjoy a day off Thursday before they hurl themselves into three critical games at Citizens Bank Park against the Phillies. Earlier, as Gelbs’ colleague, Gary Cohen, saw Lindor’s ball disappear over the right field wall, he’d exclaimed: “Linsanity!”
Twelve years ago, in Toronto, at the very peak of Jeremy Lin’s dream ride, he’d hit a 3 at the buzzer and the Knicks beat the Raptors. In that moment it felt like the biggest moment a New York athlete has ever had in the province of Ontario. It has company now.
