NEW YORK — The countdown starts in the first inning, in a bullpen keenly aware of the challenge ahead of it.
“How,” Drew Smith wondered, “can we get 27 outs?”
Navigating 27 outs in a postseason game is a bear, always. Doing it against this relentless Los Angeles Dodgers lineup, the one that doesn’t swing at pitches outside the zone, can be overwhelming.
Doing it with a tired and ineffective bullpen? Sisyphus feels for you.
And yet, here the New York Mets were, late Friday night, their bags packed and their buses departing for the airport and another cross-country flight to Los Angeles. The Mets extended their season with a 12-6 win over the Dodgers that felt tenser than the margin. Game 6 of this National League Championship Series is set Sunday night in Chavez Ravine.
“This is something we’ve done all year,” said starter David Peterson. “We get down, and we continue to show up and compete.”
In the wake of Thursday night’s Game 4, Ryne Stanek and Edwin Díaz walked back in from the bullpen together, neither of them used in another lopsided loss. The Mets had used everyone else in that pen over the prior two nights for more than three outs. They could do the math.
“We joked, ‘You’ve got two (innings) and I’ve got two,’” Stanek said. “So we were very much anticipating it.”
Turns out they’d underestimated.
Because with 13 outs to go in a 10-5 game, Carlos Mendoza pulled Reed Garrett. He went to Stanek in the fifth inning to face Shohei Ohtani, and Stanek knew there was no one but Díaz behind him.
Last week, Stanek had passionately pointed out an overlooked aspect of Sean Manaea’s Game 3 win over the Phillies in the NLDS. Manaea had induced a huge double play to end the sixth inning, which felt like it might be the end of his performance. Instead, he came back for the seventh and the eighth, to save the New York’s bullpen.
“I don’t know if the fans at home or in the stands will appreciate that enough,” he said. “It is so hard to have that emotional release and go back out and still keep yourself under control.
“It’s hard to ask him to do more — and he f—— did it. That was awesome. That’s the s— that gets me fired up.”
It’s exactly what Stanek himself did Friday.
The 33-year-old has pitched eight big-league seasons. Friday was his 430th major-league appearance; it’s the first time he’s ever gotten a seventh out in a game. He had been asked to pitch across three innings only once before, as a rookie back in 2017. (That time, he allowed the only three batters he faced in that third inning to reach.)
But he struck out Ohtani in the fifth, rebounded from a Mookie Betts solo homer in the sixth and retired the side in order in the seventh. When Gavin Lux popped up his 31st pitch, he didn’t wait for Jeff McNeil to catch it before he started barking his way toward the dugout — finally ready for that emotional release.
“It’s a cool feeling,” he said Friday. “Knowing the job isn’t one out or two or four, you try to restrain yourself for that lull. You try to keep as even a keel as possible and let it ride.”
“He’s amazing,” said Brandon Nimmo. “It’s what we’re asking of everybody: to go past where they’ve been and be able to deliver. He did it and then some.”
It was Díaz’s turn from there. He’d walked out to the bullpen an inning early and started stretching an inning early. He threw his first warmup pitch in the seventh with Stanek in the game. He knew when he entered in the eighth that the final six outs were his, that there was no backup in the pen.
Looking as sharp as he has this month, the closer retired six of the seven Dodgers he faced, needing only 23 pitches to do so.
“We needed every out, for sure,” Smith said. “You get them any way you can.”
The Mets on Friday could count all the way to 27 outs. Now they just have to count to two more wins.
“We haven’t done anything easy yet this year,” said Stanek. “Why stop now?
“We can beat them,” Díaz said. “We’ve got (Sean) Manaea going Sunday. We can beat them.”
(Photo of Edwin Díaz and Francisco Alvarez: Al Bello / Getty Images)
