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June 16, 2013.
A going-nowhere Mets team was taking it up the butt from an even-worse Cubs team. The Bearcubs were ahead in the standings but their season was falling apart, while the Mets weren't sure if they were ever going to put one together. The Amazin's having hung only one W in their previous seven contests, Terry Collins wasn't too far off when he said it felt like they hadn't won in a week. And this Sunday matinee at Citi seemed like more of the same, only worse. Managing only three hits in seven innings all afternoon against Matt Garza — who up until that point was in the midst of the worst season of his long and solidly mediocre career — they took a perfect inning in the face in the eighth from James Russell, coming on in relief of Garza.
Down 3-0 in the ninth, Carlos Marmol came on for the save — a save that wouldn't come to pass.
Former Cub Marlon Byrd led off and broke the ice with an impressively deep shot to left-center to stir the team and the remainder of the 30,256 fans into motion, as the likelihood of a Mets win tweaked up from 3% to 7%. Lucas Duda knew the team could swing for the fences like animals, but catching up was going to be hard to do without baserunners, so he worked out a 3-2 walk.
John Buck, who had started the season on a homerun tear, but was deep in the hole by June, sent Duda to second with a single through the right side, and kapowie, suddenly Jordany Valdespin's worst nightmare was the tying run on first.
Now, another man might have pinch-run for his acrolith of a catcher. But Terry Collins was no other man, and with two big donkeys in place of racehorses on the basepaths, he sent his shortstop Omar Quintanilla up to bunt. Q, with faith the size of a mustardseed, proceeded to move mountains, laying down a textbook bunt to the third-base side to get Duda to third and Buck to second.
Up stepped Kirk Nieuwenuiss, promoted only a week before from [CROSSOUT]Syracuse Buffalo New Orleans[/CROSSOUT] Las Vegas. Kirk was a heckuvan athlete, lean and strong — an off-tackle-running halfback-type on the gridiron, a decathlete-type on the track, but as a baseball player, he was an all-or-nothing type. He ran hard, he threw hard, and he swung hard. His game wasn't refined, but, oh boy, if he ran into one ....
He ran into one.
Nieuwenhuis was a pull hitter. The kind that, if it had been 2018, would have been facing defenses with all four infielders to the right of second. But after taking an initial ball Captain Kirk got one inside where he liked it. And he parked one where I liked it — way up in the upper tank of Citi Field right field pavilion.
Pandemonium. Players streaked from the dugout, jumping up and down in unison, causing a minor (Bartolo Colón had yet to arrive in Queens) quake. High-fives, tears, and hugs spread all around the stadium. With his three-homer game more than two years away in the future, Kirk Nieuwenhuiss had etched his long name into Citi Field history.
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Suddenly the Mets were united. And a second-year player up from wherever was the instigator. Not only that, they had an enemy to unite against. Doing updates that afternoon from The U.S. Open golf tournament, NBC's Bob Costas inexplicably decided to be the sarcastic voice of reason. “The Mets with four in the bottom of the ninth to win it 4-3, and a team 14 games under .500 celebrates as if it just won the seventh game of the World Series,” Costas drolly intoned from Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. “Another indication of the ongoing decline of Western civilization.”
Met fans, having joyfully been shaken from a summer of doldrums, were aghast. Costas was annoying, but he was usually the embodiment of smarts and class. And more than that, an unabashed baseball fan despite making his bones hosting football shows. Everybody knew he was a tool — and growing more toolish as he grew into his graying years dying his hair in a futile attempt to sustain his boyish charm — but few had suspected he was an outright dick. But he was out of the closet now. He was not only a dick. He was huge dick. A dickless dick. And practically nobody was going to argue.
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/TheDA53/status/346424135834030080[/TWEET]
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/TheDA53/status/346424374573817857[/TWEET]
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/jeremy_hefner53/status/346421983090708480[/TWEET]
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/JMaloneStrength/status/346399834678370304[/TWEET]
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/Jay_HorwitzPR/status/346440334152183808[/TWEET]
[TWEET]https://twitter.com/Jay_HorwitzPR/status/346660485451628545[/TWEET]
Remember when pies were a thing? It's nice to see Jay Horwitz recapture the swagger of youth by owning Costas in that next-to-last tweet.
But Aardsma called it in his second tweet above. The win did spark the team into something of a turnaround, taking 10 of their next 16, and 15 of 24. Any hopes to turn the run into a playoff kick were torn in late August along with Matt Harvey's UCL, but it sure helped make a baseball season out of something that had been looking like just another excuse to turn the calendar. The Mets actually finished 74-88, a game worse than the previous season (stupid UCL), but at the time, they were behind Chicago in the standings, and the Cubs would limp home at 66-96 and fire manager Dale Sveum, all stemming from that one ninth-inning blast.
  http://www.ultimatemets.com/scorecard_graph.php?game=8268&font=1>
Plus, they had Anthony Recker. And everyday is a win when you have Anthony Recker in your dugout.
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