Stay Up Late

Game 44 - Mets

Mets 9, Phillies 8 (16 inn.)
Record: 27-17

[superlative]
[superlative]
[hyperbole]
[melodrama]
[melodrama]
[overstatement]
[expletive]

I don't have it in me to actually enter prose into the formula above, so you'll just have to fill in the blanks. 16 innings, five hours and 22 minutes, 14 pitchers, so many heroes, so few goats (Trachsel, Heilman, maybe Delgado, if really pressed). A Carlos Beltran bomb to right ended the affair in the middle of the night, mercifully.

I wrote the Mets off more than once in the original nine innings (like when a short-hop on an otherwise splendid chuck from Endy Chavez handcuffed Paul LoDuca, eventually costing the Mets four runs), then felt sure that the underbelly of the bullpen would falter. My crabby pessimism was rewarded time and time again. Several times I stood up from the couch, aimed the remote at the screen, and made thumb contact with the power button; though I was remarkably manic, the button was never depressed. I'd sit back down, cuss the Mets, and glance at my watch for another projected "okay, I'm going up at" time . . . which would be laughably discarded later.

I knew I had to get up at Tony Orlando's vantage point to drive three hours to work, but good night's sleep never ascended higher than see what happens in my agenda. More than once I've TiVoed the end of a Mets game and woken up early to catch the finish before seeing the box score, but this game had been too wild, too Loch Ness Monstery to relegate to groggy, early morning spectating. The post-midnight logic, of course (and you've been there before), is that if a game is worth watching for 14 innings, it's surely worth watching through at least [enter meaningless number here] innings. And so it went. How long would I have lasted? At some point my (and others') health on the road would have been seriously jeopardized, but I managed to log six hours of snooze time between radar guns reaching 91 mph. Good enough.

Carlos Beltran.
[superlative]
[superlative]
[hyperbole]
[melodrama]
[melodrama]
[overstatement]
[expletive]

A big, big win to say the least. A losable win, as we like to say. A comeback (x 4), extra-inning, walk-off, emotional, barn-burning, blah blah blah . . . it was a great end to a gut-wrenching, five-hour marathon. And now I'm spent. It's too bad Rob's Red Sox are on a premature All-Star hiatus or something, because this space could get awfully stale if I fall asleep for the next four or five days.