Mets-Phillies Is New Yankees-Red Sox

NEW YORK -- Blasphemy, you'll say, but think about it. What are you going to remember about Tuesday night's Yankees-Red Sox game? David Ortiz's third home run of the year? Nick Green's second? Maybe Josh Beckett, fine, but the fact is this isn't 2003-04 anymore, the Red Sox own the Yankees now and they're both probably making the playoffs anyway, what with the Rays looking like World Series-hangover-roadkill.

No, this here is where it's at for big-time baseball rivalries circa 2009. Mets-Phillies has morphed from spring training trash talk to nailbiting, in-season theater, complete with all the subplots, drama and good, intense baseball you can take. Tuesday night had everything anybody could ask of a midseason rivalry game, and in the end it was the battered-underdog Mets who came away with a 6-5 victory that was in no way easy but in all ways satisfying.

"At this point, every game that we win is big for us," Mets manager Jerry Manuel said. "Until we feel that we're healthy, every game we win is another day off the calendar and another day closer to being healthy."

This is the latest plot twist in the running drama that Mets-Phillies has become. In order for the story to turn, there had to be a switch in status. The Phillies have become the hunted, the Mets the hungry hunters -- undermanned and underestimated, decimated by injuries but somehow suddenly tougher. The Mets of 2006, 2007 and 2008 couldn't take a punch. The Mets of 2009 are determined to show they can take them all.

"What we need to do right now is win," Carlos Beltran said. "It doesn't matter how."

"The Phillies are there, the crowd is into it, the adrenaline was flowing, 100 percent. I think you know, I'm the kind of guy who goes for that."
-- Mets' Francisco RodriguezInjuries to core players such as Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado and J.J. Putz have resulted in a guerrilla underdog mentality in the home clubhouse at Citi Field. It's said that adversity reveals character, but for the Mets it apparently had to be just the right kind. Three years' worth of choking away end-of-season opportunities wasn't enough to toughen them, but this stunning rash of 2009 injuries may just be. At the very least, they're thinking the way tough teams need to think.

On this night, the Mets and the Phillies turned cavernous Citi Field into a New Yankee Stadium-style bandbox, swatting 18 percent as many homers in one game as had been hit in the ballpark's first 26. The Mets hit three and the Phillies hit four off of Johan Santana, who only once before had allowed that many homers in a game and was so vexed by the development that he went totally off the matrix. One of Santana's catch phrases in interviews is that he's never "trying to do anything crazy out there." But in this one, he threw that mantra out the window twice.

In the top of the sixth inning, Santana allowed his third homer of the game, a two-run Jimmy Rollins shot that put the Phillies on top 4-3. So when he came to bat in the bottom of the sixth, with one out and runners on first and second, he was ordered to bunt. He couldn't get the bunt down, and the count ran to 0-2, and once again he looked down at third base and saw the bunt sign. So he squared to bunt. And then he saw the pitch.

"They gave me the bunt sign, but I saw the ball right there," Santana said. "And I just wanted to swing."

So he did. He pulled the bat back and swung and hit a line drive into the right-field corner, tying the game at 4-4. Two batters later, Alex Cora drove in the run that would put the Mets ahead to stay, but the chatter in the dugout was still about Santana's hit. Everybody knew he'd ignored the sign. Nobody cared.

"Johan's got a good feel for the game," David Wright said. "So if he swings, I trust him. I'm sure Jerry will say something to him."

Manuel didn't have much to say to Santana after Chase Utley's homer in the top of the eighth cut the Mets' lead down to 6-5. With nobody out and Santana's pitch count sitting at a meager 93, Manuel decided it was time to trust the game to the bullpen. Santana disagreed. He held the ball aloft as Manuel approached and said, several times, "I'm a man," as if the only reason the manager was going to take him out was because he somehow believed him to be female.

"I'm not sure what he meant by that, to tell you the truth," Manuel said later.

"I just felt that I had enough stuff to battle through it," Santana said. "But he thought different. He's my skipper, and I respect everything he does, but I felt that I had enough stuff to get through that inning."

We'll never know, because it was Bobby Parnell and then Pedro Feliciano who finished off the eighth. And once the eighth was finished and the Mets had the lead, they felt they'd attained something.

Yes, in the most table-turning irony of this flowering rivalry, it's the Mets who this year own the ninth inning. Earlier in the day, the Phillies put suddenly-struggling Brad Lidge, the closer who didn't blow a save all last year en route to the World Series title, on the disabled list. At the end of the day, Jerry Manuel brought Francisco Rodriguez into the game with a one-run lead on the Phillies and asked for the final three outs.

Rodriguez, for the 16th time in 16 chances this year, delivered.

"Just to see him come in and do his work, just the intensity that he brings," Wright said, marveling at his team's fiery new closer. "It's not just the saves, but the situations. He's been in a lot of one-run games. I think he really enjoys this stage, and we saw it again tonight."

Rodriguez gave up a leadoff single to Rollins but managed to hold him on first base while striking out Pedro Feliz. He got a double-play grounder from Matt Stairs that would have ended the game but for Rollins' rivalry-juiced takeout slide of Cora at secoond base, and then he calmly whiffed Greg Dobbs to end it.

"The Phillies are there, the crowd is into it, the adrenaline was flowing, 100 percent," Rodriguez said. "I think you know, I'm the kind of guy who goes for that."

His teammates know it too, and he's a big part of the reason this thing ain't over by a long shot. The team in first place by two games is still the World Series champs. The team that's chasing them is still the banged-up bunch that coughed up this division each of the past two Septembers. And until we see them finish it off one of these years, there's no reason to give the Mets the benefit of the doubt.

But something about these Mets is different this year, and it's enough to make Mets-Phillies the best rivalry in baseball right now.