Carlos Mendoza leads resilient Mets into playoffs

This is the time of year for it in baseball, the best time, September becoming October, when everything is happening at once. So if you are Carlos Mendoza and Francisco Lindor and Edwin Díaz and another Mets team that has become amazin’, it means that you can win as great a regular-season game as any Mets has ever won — and the manager can make as brave a decision as any Mets manager has ever made — and all it does is win you a trip to Milwaukee.

A team that had first started getting back up at the end of May when it was 22-33 and had just fallen down hard by losing 10-3 to the Dodgers at home, got back up again on Monday afternoon against the Braves, in what felt like an Alabama vs. Georgia of a baseball game at the end. The Mets were behind, 0-3, as they tried not to have to play for their season in Game 2 of a doubleheader pushed to Monday by Hurricane Helene, then went ahead, 6-3, in the top of the eighth before falling behind, 7-6, when Ozzie Albies cleared the bases with a double off Díaz after the pitcher had failed to cover first on a play that would have ended the bottom of the eighth.

But then their MVP, Lindor, just back from having a very bad back that forced him to miss two games against the Brewers in Milwaukee just last weekend, put his team on his back again and hit a two-run homer. Then Mendoza decided to send Díaz back out for the bottom of the ninth and he got the three outs that put the Mets back into the postseason, even though they lost Game 2 as the Braves punched their own ticket to October as well.

Again: This is the beauty of the month, where even a defining moment like this for a manager and his closer and his team — extraordinary circumstances created by a terrible storm that pushed back the end of the regular season for these two teams — just means you have survived and advanced before the tournament even begins.

“Don’t take me out,” Díaz pleaded with Mendoza when told he was out of the game by pitching coach Jeremy Hefner after the eighth, when he had managed to strike out Marcell Ozuna to get out of the inning with Albies still on second, and the game still at 7-6.

Mendoza did not take out Díaz, and the Mets really had won as dramatic a regular-September game as they have ever won, because of Mendoza’s belief in his star closer and because the player who has been his total star, really from the day Mendoza got his job, making a swing that will be remembered in a game that will be remembered by Mets fans. Now they return to Milwaukee, where they just were last weekend, to play one of the toughest outs in the world this season. They go from a win like Monday’s and go from their champagne celebration in Atlanta to another Game 1, this one in Beer City. Really they make the short flight from September to October.

When their 8-7 victory had concluded, when it was “in the books,” as their wonderful radio voice Howie Rose says, and before their happy clubhouse celebration had begun, the calmest among them was Lindor. He had made a totally composed trip around the bases after the home run that had cleared the right-field wall at Truist Park had scored Starling Marte ahead of him.

When Lindor was then asked on the field what the day had meant to him, he simply said, “It means we are one step closer to where we want to be.”

Later, in the clubhouse, he would say, “I always believed this team was capable of doing special things.”

It has been doing them since May 29, with a 67-40 record that turned the Mets from one of the worst teams in baseball to the best over the next 100-plus games. Now, they get the Brewers, whose former manager, Craig Counsell, was thought to be the top candidate to manage the Mets once David Stearns, Counsell’s old boss with the Brewers, became the top baseball boss at Citi Field. Counsell went to the Cubs instead. Pat Murphy became the new Brewers manager, and Mendoza got the Mets job.

Not only will Mendoza and Murphy likely finish 1-2 for Manager of the Year in the National League (though the Braves’ Brian Snitker might end up in that conversation, too), they will be together at American Family Field as both teams take a much bigger step toward getting to where they both want to be.

The Mets could have gone home if they had lost Game 1 in Atlanta in what would have been heartbreak fashion, then gone on to lose again. But Lindor — who had singled and scored in the Mets’ big eighth — wouldn’t let them lose. The manager wouldn’t take out his closer in the biggest roll of the dice a rookie manager could have. By the end of the night, Game 1 against the Braves for Mendoza’s crew had become Game 1 against the Brew Crew.

“You could write a book,” Mendoza would say about everything that happened in Atlanta on Monday.

You could. Now turn the page. It’s October 1.