The Business Of Takin' Care Of Business

The Mets were down 1-0 after three innings on Friday and, while not an insurmountable lead, the fright did creep in a little bit. “Here we go. Mets collapse when we need them most.” Then I had this fear as Gary, Keith and Ron were talking about how the wind was creeping in and how Ryan Howard hit a double that would have been a home run on another night. I had a vision of the Mets trying to hit all these home runs through a biting wind, and all the small ball enthusiasts tweeting “SEE?!?!? SEE?!!?!??!”

Then an amazing thing happened. Yoenis Cespedes smacked one through the hole they gave him for a two out single. (And he’s done that a lot lately.) Curtis Granderson stroked a single up the middle. Jay Bruce … JAY BRUCE … took a pitch the other way through the hole in his shift for a game tying single. It’s almost as if they’ve been brainwashed to scratch for runs and hit through holes. (Or they just pay attention to the media.) Or maybe it was the whispering wind told them to find another way.

Find it they did. T.J. Rivera followed with another single to give the Mets a lead which they would not relinquish. Bruce knocked in two more runs with a homer (fourth in six games) and a single, and Robert Gsellman went six strong against a team who hasn’t figured him out the third time around, as the Mets came away with a 5-1 victory to quell my fears about another collapse. The Mets beat a team they should have beaten, especially the way they played tonight defensively.

They played like a team ready for the off-season, which doesn’t bode well after Cameron Rupp’s tweet about wanting to ruin somebody’s season. The Cardinals won by a touchdown (which is something the former St. Louis football team hasn’t done yet), and the Giants have bludgeoned the Dodgers, which means that everything remains the same except with another day off the schedule. So here’s the drill: The Mets are at 86 victories. One more win puts them at 87 for the season. And guess what that does: Clinches home field for the wild card. That 87th win, in a season that was so reminiscent of ’87 for a while, won’t be the finish line. But it’ll move the finish line.

By the way, Gsellman has brought about an interesting discussion about whether he or Seth Lugo would get a Game 2 start in a potential NLDS. (And in a brief moment of Post Traumatic Mets Disorder, I almost typed Julio Lugo.) Do you trust Lugo’s spin rate on his curveball, or does his high rate of stranded runners (85.7%) strike you as something that can’t be maintained?