In the bottom of the 10th inning, bottom of a crazy night of Subway Series baseball, it seemed right that Brandon Nimmo would be the one with the bat in his hand. Nimmo’s fingerprints were already all over this series.
He’d slammed a first-inning home run Tuesday; a few hours later he’d dropped a ball that led to the winning run scoring. Earlier in this night he’d taken one for the team, absorbing a fastball to the elbow that kept the line moving during a two-run seventh-inning rally; moments later he looked up and saw he was in no-man’s land and was thrown out scrambling back into second, killing the rally.
“Baseball,” Nimmo would say, “is funny like that.”
Now it was the 10th inning. The Mets had done plenty of things to lose the game already. The Yankees had maybe done even more to lose the game. But the score was still tied. The ghost runner, Eduardo Escobar, was on second. Nimmo took a curveball for strike one from Nick Ramirez, the fifth Yankee relief pitcher whom Aaron Boone had summoned even though Nimmo was hitting .337 against lefties this year.
“First time facing him,” Nimmo said. “I’m looking for a pitch in the middle of the plate and put a good swing on it.”
Across these first 2 ½ months of the season, so little has happened for the Mets the way they’d planned them to go. But now Ramirez threw one middle-middle. Nimmo put a good swing on it. As he looked up, he was surprised to see that Jake Bauers was playing extra-shallow in right.
“I see that,” Nimmo said, “and I’m begging for the ball to go out.”
At the other ballpark, the one on the other side of the RFK Bridge, the ball would’ve gone out. Here, it took a bounce. The majority of the 44,121 inside Citi Field, the ones wearing hues of orange and blue, started to roar, then gasped it back when they saw that Escobar had gone back to tag and so he had to shift into a dead sprint to make it home.
But he made it home. The Mets won 4-3. They will not be preserving the tape of this game on behalf of Cooperstown, or the Smithsonian, but the Mets are well past the point where they’re at all concerned with style points.
“We scored more runs than they did over the course of the game,” was the way Buck Showalter summarized the 3-hour, 17-minute game that came after a 37-minute rain delay. “Good win for us.”
At 32-36, they are all good. And all welcome.
“Everything is better when we win,” Nimmo said.
The Mets are so desperate for anything resembling good news, so determined to put something like a streak together, they weren’t about to dwell on the slapstick that had ruled most of the game’s final third. The main event — Justin Verlander vs. Gerrit Cole, surefire Hall of Famer vs. on-the-right-track Hall of Famer — had been exactly as you’d expect, the two aces throwing six strong innings apiece, allowing one run each.
After that?
Well, the Mets’ generosity in the top of the seventh knew no bounds, when one bad decision by Jeff McNeil paired with one poor execution by Mark Vientos led to a tie-breaking run before Isiah Kiner-Falafa made like Jackie Robinson and executed a straight steal of home, while it seemed flummoxed Mets lefty Brooks Raley tried — and failed — to purposely hit the batter to render the play dead.
But the Yankees refused to let the Mets pick up the check, handing the Mets two runs back in the bottom half, one when Nimmo was plunked, one on a base hit by Starling Marte … and even on that play the Mets tripped over their clown shoes. For some reason, Joey Cora held Vientos at third. Nimmo couldn’t believe it when he looked up.
He didn’t feel bad about that one, in truth: he knew — as did the other 44,000 and change in the yard — that Cora should’ve sent Vientos, forced Billy McKinney to make the throw. He did feel bad about the muffed catch Tuesday night, though, so much so that he felt compelled to assure his mates as he stepped to the plate in the 10th that he planned to atone. And then did.
“I was glad to have the opportunity to come through for the boys,” he said.
He came through. There have been too few moments like that for the boys this year. They celebrated. They savored. Then ran off the field before anyone could take it back from them.
