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Buck Showalter and his culture held up after all. Under extreme duress, on the brink of disaster, Showalter’s Mets showed up at Citi Field on Saturday night to win a sudden-death playoff game, one night after they did not bother to show up at all.
Four wild-card teams faced elimination on this day, and only one lived to tell about it. Showalter’s.
And after his Mets had defeated the Padres by a 7-3 count, the winning manager wanted to talk about the poise his players showed in staying within themselves with the stakes as high as they were.
“It’s so easy to get out of it,” Showalter said. “It takes a lot of discipline. … Sometimes less is more, and that’s hard to do.
“It’s a real tribute to the players.”
And to the manager who prepared them to face and ace this manhood challenge.
For all his homespun stories and off-schedule filibusters designed to divert his audience from the urgent issues of the day, Showalter had to feel the heat before this one. He is universally respected for his baseball acumen, his extreme attention to detail, and his ability to mold and inspire teams over the six-month regular-season grind.
He is also known as a manager with a 9-15 postseason record, and as a 66-year-old lifer who has never advanced to the World Series.
Showalter has suffered some brutal playoff losses in his day, including the epic Game 5 loss to Seattle as the Yankees’ manager on Saturday’s date, Oct. 8, 27 years ago, in the 11th inning in the Kingdome. A Mets catcher name Todd Pratt once eliminated his Diamondbacks with a 10th-inning Game 4 homer in the ’99 NLDS that would go down as one of Pratt’s two career postseason hits.
