It’s been 731 days since the worst day in the history of the New York Mets franchise, but it still feels just as bad as the first and just thought of it leaves most Met fans with the face you see above.
On September 30, 2007, the Mets completed the worst regular season collapse in the history of the game, falling to the Florida Marlins 8-1 and handing the National League East championship to the Phillies.
What the Mets had spent the last 2 years building as a championship franchise disappeared in the course of 3 hours (and ultimately, the next September and all of 2009). The players and management can talk about how it didn’t affect their psyche, but it’s been quite obvious that they’ve been chasing ever since. That day and, what happened in Game 7 the previous year, and the following September have left even the most loyal Met fans (including yours truly) with a deep amount of distrust and resentment.
In 2008, the thought the orange and blue might replicate the abject failure of the previous September was there, but not in 2007.
Sure, the team’s biggest free agent acquisition that winter was Moises Alou, but this was a team that was one fluke home run away from a World Series the year before. Tom Glavine continued to be the staff ace in the final year of his contract, El Duque was his old (and I do mean old) reliable self in the 2-spot, John Maine was continuing to make leaps and bounds in his 2nd full season, and Oliver Perez was showing the promise that Mets’ brass saw when they traded for him the previous July. Despite no Duaner Sanchez and a sub-par Scott Schoeneweis, the bullpen was in its 2006 form. With a healthy Alou, the offense was just as potent as its 2006 counterpart.
In addition to being on a mission to finish what the 2006 team came so painstakingly short of, there was fuel on the fire when Philly shortstop Jimmy Rollins declared the Phillies the team to beat in the NL East, bringing life to a rivalry that had been largely dormant for its history.
While the Phillies had 2 critical sweeps during the season (a 3-gamer in Shea in early June and a 4-game sweep in Philly at the end of August which featured just about every way you could lose a ball game), the Mets had a 6 1/2 game going into a three-game showdown with them at Shea Stadium on September 14.
It’s a strange day for me, as it signaled a beginning and an end in different respects. That night was my first night working in radio as I was covering a high school football game in Stuart for Sebastian River High. I remember listening to Aaron Heilman surrender a go-ahead sac fly to Greg Dobbs in the 10th inning, giving the Phillies a 3-2 win and bringing them with 5 1/2 games, with the radio crew having a post-game meal. Still, no big deal, right? Rollins would hit a 2-run triple in the 7th on Saturday and Guillermo Mota would begin his trail of devastation on Sunday, loading the bases in the 6th, eventually setting up a Dobbs grand slam off of Jorge Sosa to seal a 10-6 win, the sweep and shrinking the lead to 3 ½. But hey, the Phillies are a pretty good team and they don’t have to play them again, so it’s all good. Right?
Here’s where it gets painful.
Even with the lead the shrinking, Met fans weren’t pulling their hair out like the following year. This was a team that when push came to shove, usually handled it’s business. Plus, the schedule was in their favor as the final 14 games against bottom-feeders Washington and Florida and a make-up game against a St. Louis club that was out of contention and banged up. If ever there was a gift-wrapped division championship, this was it.
For some reason, Omar Minaya thought it would be a swell idea to sign Brian Lawrence in December 2006, despite the fact that Lawrence hadn’t been relevant (or any shade of servicable) in almost 4 years. With El Duque hurt (only made a brief cameo during implosion), a pitcher who was more used up than a 1997 Camry, was now asked to stop the bleeding against a team hungry to play spoiler and led by a manager eager to get back at the team who he felt should’ve hired him back in the winter of 2004, instead of Willie Randolph. Naturally, Lawrence gave back a 4-0 lead that the Mets had built off of future Met disaster Tim Redding. Aaron Sele, Schoenewis and 4 Met errors (10 in 2 games) finished it, as Washington won going away 12-4. They would blow another 4-0 lead and a 7-3 lead the next night, as Austin Kearns and Wily Mo Pena continued to transform into the ’07 Ruth and Gehrig, the lead now down to 2 ½. They’d stop the slide the next night but it would be followed by what would be personally, the most painful defeat of the freefall.
September 20th, my 21st birthday. I was actually supposed to go to the game that night, but it fell through at the last moment and thank God. Being 21 and having nothing to do, ordering the Extra Innings package can be a dangerous thing. As The Collapse ventured on, watching the games turned me into an emotional puddle of a human being, however this night would be more pathetic. Since the geniuses that have run the Marlins got into a 13-year pissing match with the cable companies that only ended just this season, a critical 4-game set was not available to any Met fans living in the Sunshine State. On this night I was reduced to running back and forth from talking and having cake with relatives to running into my room to check the game on the computer. In the 9th inning, Marlon Anderson hit a bases clearing triple and Beltran then brought him home to make it a 7-4 lead. Awesome, the Mets right the ship on my birthday, great birthday present. WRONG. When Billy Wagner wussed out with back spasms (nothing like getting $10 million a year and bailing in a big spot), Jorge Sosa was brought into close, who immediately imploded, giving up 3 in the 9th (thanks in part to a David Wright throwing error) and then a game-winning Dan Uggla double in the 10th, leaving a mouth agape irish kid who just turned 21 with only one thing to do.
They would win the final three games (though nearly imploding on Sunday, coughing up a 9th inning lead only to recover in extras), highlighted by me during the Saturday game at Dolphin Stadium yelling at Guillermo Mota to sit the hell down when all he did was stand up to shake his arms loose.
They’d save the worst for last.
The Nationals continued their best impression of the ’27 Yankees, while Pelfrey was still in a rut (you know, the one he went back into this season), Tom Glavine showed a preview of what was to come and Phillip Humber was pulled too early in his first major league start with a 6-2 lead in which Joe Smith and Pedro Feliciano gave up 5 runs in the span of 3 minutes. Also, I’m pretty sure the Mets hit into 20 double plays during the series, and David Wright hitting into 8 of them. Irony of ironies: who got the save to complete the sweep? Luis Ayala. More proof that God hates the Mets.
They’d waste Pedro Martinez’s last good start as a Met in a make-up game with St. Louis the following night to fall into a tie with the Phils, being shut out 3-0 by Joel Piniero. Repeat: Joel Piniero. On a side note, will all these experts please stop talking about how the Cardinals have a great 3-man rotation for the playoffs? Carpenter and Wainwright, yes, but Joel Piniero? Child please. It’s JOEL FREAKING PINIERO! The guy defines pedestrian!
The Collapse reached a new low when Oliver Perez’s renassiance season ended with a whimper, giving up 6 runs in 3 2/3 innings as the Mets fell out of first place. The next 2 days would reach levels of the absurd and tragic.
Let me put it this way: If Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden didn’t, and Johan Santana doesn’t, there will NEVER be a Mets no-hitter. But John Maine nearly did it on the second to last day of the season, carrying a no-no for 7 2/3, losing it on an infield single by Paul Hoover. Between work and going to/at my friend’s house, I kept my nose buried in my phone watching it , thinking “It HAS to happen this way” and just laughing how it surreal it was. What occurred after the Hoover single would be the ultimate case of pride before the fall. After a shouting match, Jose Reyes charged Miguel Olivo, sparking off a bench-clearing brawl in the process, giving the Marlins incentive for Sunday.
Meanwhile, Matt Chico kept the Phillies in check, and it was a dead heat going to the final day of the season. If it were any other two teams, it’d be amazing theater. Instead, it would be akin to the South Park episode where they tried to remove Butters’ bad dreams.
Again, with no TV and attending 2 different family-related parties that I had to be dragged to, I was stuck to the phone and watching gamecast, only to watch horror unfold.
Hanley Ramirez walks, Uggla fielder’s choice, Jeremy Hermida single, Miguel Cabrera RBI single (crap, but Tommy will get out of this), Cody Ross doubles home Hermida and Cabrera then scores on a throwing error by Glavine (no….no….no….this can’t be happening….maybe there’s a mistake….there’s no way), Mike Jacobs single, Matt Treanor walks (what the hell is he doing? Get him out of there), Alejandro De Aza singles (he’s toast), Dontrelle Willis hit by a pitch with the bases loaded (oh my God, we’re screwed), Glavine gone (and good freaking riddance), Jorge Sosa in (great Willie, who doesn’t get enough blame for being an absolute corpse in the midst of the disaster), Ramirez strikes out, 2-run double for Uggla (we’re doomed), Hermida grounds out.
And just like that, it was over. The Marlins ace wasn’t much better (not making it out of the 3rd) as the Mets scratched across a run in the first and had the bases loaded when Ramon Castro’s blast died on the track. They would never come close again and when the Nationals laid down for the Phillies, The Collapse was complete.
By the time I got to the 2nd party, the only hope was for the Nationals to make a miracle rally. My dad, seeing the mood I was in, decided to have me join in a volleyball game he was playing with his buddies. Understand, this is a beautiful house right on the Indian River with plenty of palm trees, just a perfect place. So I’m playing, trying to take my mind off what was happening, when I’m running for a spike when I realized I was going to smack right into a palm tree. I caught myself mid-stride like Felix Jones Monday night and started backpedaling, with one problem: I couldn’t stop. BOOM! For two seconds, I honestly thought I had cracked my head open. There I was, on the porch of a beautiful, expensive house, holding a soda can to the back of my head to stop the bleeding, while looking at a phone, hoping and praying that the worst of worst case scenarios wouldn't happen. Yeah, safe to say it was the worst day ever. When I got home, I did what any rational Met fan would’ve done; I kicked my recycle bins across the front lawn and smashed the contents with a bat. But the Mets weren’t finished, they had one more knife to twist follwing the game.
In 36 words, Tom Glavine did almost as much damage as he had done in 36 pitches:
“I’m not devastated. I’m disappointed, but devastation is for much greater things in life. I’m disappointed, obviously, in the way I wanted to pitch. I can’t say there is much more I would have done differently.”
Rationally, he’s correct, given the current state of morale in our country, a baseball game should be just a hair of a blip on the radar screen. But when families are dolling out $100-$200 to go to a game to pay your ridiculous salary, it means something to them. The fans who buy your jersey and watch each game on TV or in person with a fervent passion and intensity over the course of 5 months like myself care a whole lot in that moment. Had Glavine said that the day after when the team was cleaning out their lockers, I’m probably not talking about this, but to say that immediately after the worst big-game pitching performance in the history of the game is just insulting. He would’ve been better off just saying “eh, shit happens.”
That’s what hurt the most, knowing that it doesn’t bother them as much as it does us. You spend every day from the end of March through the end of Spetember following every single game on TV, every box score, transaction, rumor, etc. and when it happens as this did, you can’t focus, you don't sleep as well, you worry, you keep thinking of superstitions that could possibly fix it and then you realize that there’s absolutely nothing you can do. You just feel like such an idiot for wasting all your time on something that went up in smoke so quickly and in such pathetic fahsion.
There was some small amount of joy when the Rockies continued their miracle run by sweeping the Phillies in the NLDS, but as I've said here before, it's like sending the guy who killed your brother into the hospital; nice, but the damage had already been done. There's no erasing the images of despondent Met fans and kids crying at Shea or a champagne-doused, grinning Jimmy Rollins, realizing that he got over. It invokes sadness, frustration, anger, disbelief, the list of emotions goes on and until they cash one in, they won't ever go away.
2008 was almost as painful because it closed Shea Stadium and thankfully, 2009 was over in July, but I can’t imagine anything ever being worse than those 16 days in September 2007.
