Mets finally destroyed the Braves demons in the greatest way

ATLANTA – In the final two innings of the 2,428th. game this major league season, a Russian novel broke out. Heroes and goats and goats that became heroes and plot twists and enough themes to fill six seasons of a streaming series.

Ultimately, the Mets needed arguably the biggest home run in franchise history to record their most important regular-season victory ever to finally conquer their terrors in this city – terrors that President of Baseball Operations David Stearns admitted they had to be gutted.

All of that made this Mets season a success. Of course they want more. No Met spoke as if that journey was complete, even though they must leave behind 18 innings, overwrought emotions, champagne and cigars and another flight to face the Brewers in the Wild Card Series on Tuesday in less than 24 hours.

But from where they were, at 0-5 and a May dive that felt like the same old Mets, and during an eighth inning Monday afternoon in which they hit their highest highs and lows several times in about 50 minutes, The Mets found the talent and boldness to ensure they'll be in Milwaukee – for baseball in October.

The Mets defeated the Braves 8-7 in the penultimate game of the regular season. But “won” is an inadequate verb for what unfolded over three hours in the first game of a doubleheader — a twin reckoning that has made its way into the Russian novel as controversy arose over its creation. And that it came a day after the regular season was supposed to end, leaving the Mets with a scenario in which they came into the game with one win and two losses would have caused heartache.

“You could write a book,” Carlos Mendoza said about that day.

The Mets survived being overwhelmed by a new Braves-clad Mets hitman named Spencer Wechselbach, who feels like someone Chipper Jones and John Smoltz conjured up in a lab to make life miserable for the Mets for about a decade. They won in this city that served as a torture chamber even as the Braves moved from one stadium to another over the past quarter century. And they emerged from the final two innings that seemed to be their wildly up-and-down season with 10 Red Bulls.

“I'm not sure I can think of a win (a regular season win in team history) that tops both the highs and the lows or what it means to do this (in Atlanta),” said Stearns, who has grown up a Mets fans. “It was important for us to do this and honestly, whoever did it in the end – for Francisco to come through like that, that’s kind of how it should be.”

All it took was a six-run top of the eighth inning in which the Mets delivered one pressured, huge hit after another. And a ninth inning in which Lindor hit a home run that puts you in a Mets discussion of the greatest of all time against Todd Pratt, who led the Diamondbacks out of the playoffs, and Ray Knight in Game 7 of the 1986 World Series and Mike Piazza after 9/11 and a few others. A home run that Brandon Nimmo called “the exclamation point on Francisco’s season.”

The drama was mounting because Lindor was coming off perhaps the Mets' best single position player season ever with a bad back, and because the Mets were just two outs away from having to play a win-or-go-home Game 162, that would have significantly reduced their chances of achieving anything in the playoffs – even with a final win.

And even after Lindor lifted a team with a Kirk Gibson Lite moment, it wasn't over. Edwin Diaz had a meltdown in the eighth inning after failing to cover first base and then allowed four runs to give Atlanta a 7-6 lead. Pitching coach Jeremy Hefner had told Diaz he was out of the game, but when Lindor hit a home run, he told Mendoza there was no way he was going out again. He blew a save. He wouldn't screw up redemption. So Diaz, who threw 26 pitches on Sunday, needed 40 more on Monday – marking the highlight of his career – to cement the Mets' 89th victory.

“This team gave me so much and trusted me,” Diaz said. “I didn’t want to be the guy who messed up. I want to fight for this team.”

Understand the implications here. A loss would have meant — among other things — Lindor having to pitch 18 innings on Monday and Luis Severino starting the nightcap while continuing to deplete the bullpen. So even a win in Game 2 would leave the Mets exhausted and needing a bullpen game to open the playoffs on Tuesday. So the opener was essentially a playoff game for both teams.

And the Mets won it. Their biggest regular-season triumph ever, in a city that Stearns knew had been “a miserable place” for the organization in the past. A Mets season didn't die here. It was reborn in what Nimmo called an “incredible rollercoaster ride.”

“We believe, we believe,” Lindor said. “I’ve said from day one that we have the team to do special things.”