What Bill Parcells said 35 years ago still applies: There’s no medals for trying in professional sports. There are no consolation prizes.
“Show me a good loser,” George Steinbrenner was fond of saying, “and I’ll show you a loser.”
Yep. All of that is fair. All of that is fine. And by now, unless you possess the rosiest rose-colored glasses in existence, you’ve probably already raced through baseball’s version of the five stages of grief, all the way from denial to acceptance.
The Dodgers are that good, and they’ve played at their best for most of this National League Championship Series. The Mets aren’t as good and needed to be at their finest and their sharpest to keep the Dodgers in their sights, and they haven’t been close. Crazy things happen in sports. This would be certifiable.
So this has to be the hope now: that the Mets can give you one final spasm of summer in the sunshine late Friday afternoon. That they can ward off the inevitable and keep this splendid ride going another two days. It’s going to take something approaching an Act of God to beat the Dodgers three straight after the thrashing they received in this one, 10-2.
Three in a row, down 3-1? Order up a miracle.
But one in a row?
The Mets can win one in a row. It’s baseball. The White Sox beat the Guardians five times this year. They beat the Yankees once. They only won 35 other games all year, but they managed to take six off the two best teams in their league. Of course, the Mets can beat the Dodgers on Friday afternoon, no matter how vast the chasm between them has looked the last two nights.
And that would be right. That would be appropriate. The fans who will stuff Citi Field for a third straight game and for the fifth time in the last eight days deserve that much. So do the Mets, who’ve reminded everyone just what an acoustic joy their home ballpark can be in October, who ought to do whatever they can to make sure this is a perennial event and not an outlier, as it’s too often been.
“We’ve had our backs against the walls before and now we do again, and we’re going to do out best to add to the story and make more magic,” said Brandon Nimmo, who is the one-man microcosm of the Mets’ struggle at the moment, barely able to run yet running hard enough to beat a double play that scored the Mets’ last run. “It’s not going to be easy but nothing about what we’ve done has been so it’s a fitting end to the story.”
They both deserve one more day in the sun, a few more “My Girl” sing-alongs whenever Francisco Lindor steps to the plate (as well as a few more “M! V! P!” chants to punctuate those at-bats). They need another couple of big swings out of the kid third baseman, Mark Vientos, who has selected October as a most opportunistic time to reach for his star.
And, sure, they’re owed a couple of more plate appearances — and, why not, maybe a rocket or two — from Pete Alonso since there’s no telling what’s going to happen between him and the Mets from here across the next few weeks and months.
Mostly, it would feel wrong to end this magic carpet ride with a sweep at home. We get it: The Dodgers did not win those 98 games in a raffle. They did not recover from the brink of elimination against the Padres by accident. They’re good. They’re damn good. They have the most electric offensive player in the sport, Shohei Ohtani, leading off, and they have Mookie Betts — only a step or three behind him — hitting second.
They have an assembly line of live arms in the bullpen. They have grinders lined up behind their stars, one after the other, and they refuse to swing at balls that drift even a millimeter out of the strike zone. The core has been tempered and hardened by plenty of their own October disappointments, and look a lot stronger for it.
There’s a reason why Steve Cohen is furiously trying to build his own model of the Dodger Way, and slap a “Mets” logo on it. The Dodgers are who the Mets want to be. And this year the Mets took a couple of large steps in that direction. But this series has been no accident, and the fourth loss that looms as inevitable will be no calamity.
But the Mets can make the Dodgers work for it. They can give Citi Field one more day in the sun, give everyone one more happy recap. They can at least make the Dodgers fly 3,000 miles to earn their champagne, and then take their chances at old Dodger Stadium.
We thought all along that they would be a tough out if they snuck in the playoffs, these Mets. The Brewers found that out the hard way. So did the Phillies. It only feels right that if the Dodgers are going to take their victory lap, they should do it on Pacific Time. It’s always sunny out there, after all.
Not here. Friday the Mets get one last day in the sun. They might as well make the most of it.
