Aug 29 2012 10:30 PM
Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Aug 30 2012 08:24 AM
BASEBALL; In a Bruising Outing, the Mets Rally and Win
By JOE SEXTON
Published: August 10, 1990
| There was blood, both bad and real. There were bruises, to egos as well as to arms and legs. Oh, and there was a ball game, too. That, the Mets won, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies last night, 5-4, at Shea Stadium. The game was obscured by a fifth-inning brawl, a tangled affair that took 20 minutes to defuse and one that will no doubt require an official National League inquiry to fully sort out. The Mets and the Phillies, teams with a history of hostility toward each other, last night staged a ferocious slugfest, a full card of wild matchups that included an umpire scoring the night's most dramatic takedown as well as the ejections of six players and a coach. A Hush in the Dugout ''Scary,'' said Bud Harrelson, the manager of the Mets. ''Nasty,'' said Randy Marsh, the home-plate umpire. ''The dugout was pretty quiet after it,'' said Howard Johnson, the Mets third baseman whose bat produced the evening's most devastating haymaker. There was plenty to be sobered by. The melee, one that may have traced its origins to an exchange of threatening pitches in Wednesday afternoon's game between the two teams, erupted in the fifth when Pat Combs's first pitch of the inning drilled Dwight Gooden in the knee. Gooden, who hit two Phillies with pitches in the first five innings, instantly tore off his helmet and headed for the mound. He was tackled from behind and punched repeatedly from on top by Darren Daulton, the Philadelphia catcher. ''I wasn't sure what he was going to do,'' Gooden said of Combs, denying he had intentionally hit either Dickie Thon or Tom Herr. ''I was going to take one pitch and see what happened. You've got to do what you've got to do.'' Leyva Lauds Combs Nick Leyva, the manager of the Phillies, said: ''Combs did the right thing. That's the way the game should be played.'' No game, though, was played for the next 20 minutes as serious scraps and bizarre standoffs broke out, incidents that included Joe West, an umpire, dumping Dennis Cook, a pitcher for the Phillies, to the infield dirt, and Darryl Strawberry, one of Gooden's best friends, becoming his most public defender. Strawberry, unable to get to Daulton, got pitched to the ground for his trouble. Gooden, Strawberry and Tim Teufel were eventually ejected for the Mets. Combs, Daulton and Cook were banished for the Phillies. ''It's the worst I've seen in a while,'' said Marsh, who said he had police reinforcements in mind as a last resort. ''It was a bad situation, and it kept dragging on.'' The game didn't exactly wrap itself up neatly once it was resumed. The Mets, trailing by 3-1 at the moment of the fight, struck for three runs in the sixth as Johnson cranked a two-run homer to level the score and Kelvin Torve set off more crowd noise than he probably had in his 10 years in the minor leagues with his two-run double to right center one out later. The onslaught helped the Mets pull within a half-game of the first-place Pirates in the National League East after Pittsburgh lost to the Montreal Expos. Dykstra Drives in 3 Even so, the Mets were far from secure. Len Dykstra drove in his third run of the night with his fourth hit of the game in the eighth off John Franco to make the score 5-4. In the ninth, Franco permitted runners to reach first and third. ''I wasn't,'' Franco said, ''as sharp as I'd have liked to be.'' This was understandable on a night when everybody, it seemed, was on edge. 'Hey, we're not afraid to fight anyone,'' Johnson said. ''Teams ask for it, it's obvious what reaction they'll get. It did wake us up.'' The entire episode was likely set in motion during Wednesday's 8-4 triumph by the Mets when Philadelphia's Don Carman and the Mets' David Cone exchanged stares and dangerous pitches of questionable intent. The lingering uneasiness was restored when Gooden hit Thon with a pitch in the second and then plunked Herr in the fifth. ''It ran through my mind that two of their guys had now been hit,'' Johnson said. ''Then I started to think of yesterday. You got the sense. . . . Marsh, anyway, maintained that he never believed Gooden was throwing at the Phillies but that Combs had specifically targeted Gooden. ''It was obvious,'' the umpire said. |
