Dramatics Aside, Big Apple Baseball Looks Rotten

FORMER BASEBALL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD -- There is a Subway Series this weekend.

There is one again in two weeks.

There will not be one in October.

Friday night's game at Yankee Stadium, which both teams deserved to lose, showed us that.

It will be remembered forever, at least in the five boroughs and surrounding areas, as the Luis Castillo game. The Mets second baseman dropped Alex Rodriguez's popup with two outs in the ninth, allowing two runs to score and the Yankees to win 9-8.

"That's hard to believe," Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. "Because we tried to give the game away all night.

"In the end, we got the big gift."

Mark Teixeira gets the gold star for never assuming Castillo would make the play, hustling all the way and scoring the winning run from first base.

(Red Sox owner John Henry, who tweaked Teixeira on Twitter after Boston's sweep this week, tweeted after Friday's game: "Great play by MT to score from first on the pop! What a night of baseball.")

But unless things improve a lot from Friday's awful display, Teixeira and everyone else on both teams gets to watch the World Series on TV.

Yes, both New York teams are in second place in their division with definite shots at the playoffs. But both teams have issues, and both came into the Subway Series having lost a series to their division archrival, the teams they will have to find a way to beat if they want to get to the World Series.

The Yankees bullpen is such a mess that Girardi brought closer Mariano Rivera in during the eighth inning of a tie game at home. In 11 seasons that Joe Torre had Rivera as his closer, he never did that. And the Yankees considered activating Brian Bruney, whom they need to pitch the eighth inning, off the disabled list without a rehabilitation assignment before sending him to Double-A to pitch Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Mets have eight players on the DL, including 40 percent of their opening-day rotation, their leadoff hitter, their set-up man and their main power source.

With so many people out, "we can't afford to make a lot of mistakes," third baseman David Wright said before Friday's game. "We have to do the little things right."

And then Luis Castillo dropped a popup.



This is a team that has run the bases poorly all year, that nearly lost a game on a Carlos Delgado dropped popup May 5 in Atlanta and that lost a game May 18 in Los Angeles thanks to another game-ending error, in the bottom of the 11th after Ryan Church missed third base on his way home in the top of the inning.

A few minutes after Castillo's gaffe, manager Jerry Manuel was admitting the Mets won't recover soon from this one -- especially Castillo, who checked into the fans' doghouse last year and had begun to emerge from it this season.

"It will definitely be a battle again," Manuel said after a third straight loss in the final at-bat. "Not only for him, but for us as well.

"We'll have to fight through things. This will be a very difficult thing, but we have time to overcome it. ... This is definitely a tremendous test for us."

Especially for a team that showed little tenacity in collapsing the past two Septembers. The Mets' goal has been to tread water until Jose Reyes and perhaps Delgado return, but they are close to gasping for air.

"If we are to get to what we feel is a championship [level]," Manuel said, "we have to endure certain things."

As for the Yankees, they will bludgeon many an opponent, especially at home. But the pitching staff has so many questions: Chien-Ming Wang has been out of whack all year, the bullpen aside from Rivera is unreliable and, on Friday, Joba Chamberlain was awful.

Girardi said Chamberlain is physically OK, but he never hit 96 mph with his fastball (95 mph once) and threw just 37 of his 69 fastballs for strikes.

Chamberlain walked five, hit two and threw 100 pitches in four innings (the Yankees starters have totaled just 22 1/3 innings the past trip through the rotation).

Then four relievers issued four more walks.

"You can't pitch like that and expect to win," Girardi said.

But they did, their seventh walk-off victory and 21st come-from-behind win, most in the majors.

"As soon as I slid in," Teixeira said, "I hugged [Derek Jeter] and I said, 'What just happened?' Because I couldn't believe it."

A bad play to end a bad game.

And then, after 378 pitches and three blown saves, Frank Sinatra blared over the public-address system: "King of the hill, top of the heap."

These teams aren't there yet.