Mission: Impossible

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Here is what playoff baseball is all about and this never changes. These are words to live by when October rolls around in the major leagues and they come from St. Francis of Assisi, who knew how to manage the game of life.

“Start by doing what is necessary, then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.’’

That sums up the the Mets Amazin’ come-from-behind victory over the Brewers in the Wild Card finale with Pete Alonso’s exclamation point ninth-inning, game-winning three-run home run and that also sums up the 6-2 win over the Phillies Saturday in Game 1 of the NLDS at Citizens Bank Park.

The Mets were held to one hit by Zack Wheeler and were losing 1-0 after seven innings but exploded for five runs in the eighth on five singles, a walk and two sacrifice flies against the Phillies bullpen.

It was a beautiful pure baseball rally, a hitting clinic with no mention of the term exit velocity.

One top evaluator told BallNine of the Mets rally on this night, “No swing out of your ass, no ego, no selfish play, old school baseball.’’

Hey Nerds, it works. It sure does, especially in October.

The Mets turned it all around this season, after getting off to a dreadful start. They are not the only ones who flipped the script.

The Divisional Series started on Saturday and life gets a little tougher in this round because the aircraft carrier teams, top money teams, join the $317 million Mets, the biggest payroll team. The Yankees are at $309 million, the Phillies are at $247 million, and the Dodgers come in at $241 million, thanks to Shohei’s Ohtani’s deferred deal.

Money helps, but it is not everything.

Leadership is invaluable in October. And not just on the field, the kind of leadership the manager delivers can be the different between advancing or going home. And that is why the Mets win over the Brewers was so impressive.

It is what I call ‘Gut Instinct’’ leadership.

Back in spring training at BallNine, I wrote that Mets manager Carlos Mendoza is a winner and a leader who knows the game inside and out because I saw all of that in his coaching years with the Yankees.

I see Mendoza as out of the Bruce Bochy School of Managing.

The Tigers came from nowhere under A.J. Hinch to shock the staggering Astros, who really missed Dusty Baker’s leadership. But the Guardians, who are so good at multiple baseball things, punched them in the face on Saturday, scoring five runs in the first inning before an out was recorded on their way to a 7-0 victory.

The Royals, who lost 106 games in 2023, blindsided the Orioles, despite all of Baltimore’s draft pick talent in the Wild Card Round. The Yankees are a much different challenge, and the Royals pushed the panic button a bit, walking eight in the Yankees 6-5 win Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.

The Padres eliminated the Braves in a year where San Diego got better as a team by subtraction, trading off Juan Soto for much needed parts, and realized the value of making contact with the baseball, thanks to the addition of Luis Arraez, who did his Tony Gwynn imitation all year and in the Wild Card Round batted .333 against the Braves.

It’s about putting the ball in play.

Sure, you can have fun, but the ultimate fun in pro sports is winning. Teams need more than talent; they need an edge.

Contact matters more than ever in October and the Mets showed that against the Phillies when Philadelphia decided to follow the familiar relievers script and not push Wheeler into the eighth inning. It blew up in their face. The Phillies and Rob Thomson should have realized that with a 1-0 lead, there was no room for error.

They didn’t. They followed the script.

This week was a most telling week, not just in playoff results, but in the Cincinnati Reds hiring of one of the game’s best managers – Terry Francona. The Reds need some accountability and leadership on the field, in the front office and ownership. For all of Elly De La Cruz’ talents, he sometimes plays the game like it is all fun and games and not cutthroat. Did you see the play where he waits until the last second to step on the bag at second for what should have been an easy force out?

Sure, you can have fun, but the ultimate fun in pro sports is winning. Teams need more than talent; they need an edge. Intangibles are built into the game and one of the biggest problems with analytics is that minutia mentality overwhelms what is really important in the game: winning.

The Nerds get involved worrying about all the little metrics they have quantified, and they forget it is a simple game where you hit the ball, catch the ball, and throw the ball. And the game tells you the script to follow, not the Nerds.

One baseball man explained it this way this week. Read these words carefully. Owners, especially, take note.

“Baseball has always been about stats,’’ the baseball man began. “Batting average and on base percentage were really important on the offensive side and ERA, hits and walks per inning were critical on the defensive side of the equation. This was because that level of stat granularity led direct to wins and losses.’’

That is the bottom line, it was about wins and losses and that’s why those stats mattered.

“In order to create wins and avoid losses you need to acquire players and guide those players to do two simple but not easy things,’’ he added. “On offense they need to avoid making outs and on defense they needed to acquire outs … the only limiting factor is the 27 outs each team gets.’’

The Brewers learned the hard way about acquiring 27 outs against the Mets. The Phillies learned in Game 1 of the NLDS about acquiring those 27 outs.

Many teams now have lost the mission. The mission is to win.

The baseball man was on a roll.

“The extremes that baseball stat guys have gone to try and codify what is going on out on the field is what my dear old dad called ‘picking gnat shit out of pepper,’’’ he said. “In my opinion the insane level of granularity which baseball stats are ground down to today has led to the lessening of the focus on understanding of the way the game should be played -and therefore the way young developing players are taught and coached. Velocity and spin rate and the ability hit the ball out of the park have overshadowed real coaching and real teaching of the proper way to play the game.’’

Boom! That is a big part of the problem and that is why it is important to have managers now who can go on gut instinct, can lead.

Mendoza has the Mets playing and clicking for one another.

Having a player who understands all this also helps and that’s why the Yankees are lucky to have Aaron Judge, who has yet to figure out hitting in postseason baseball and was 0-for-4 with three strikeouts and a walk Saturday night. The Yankees, though, have a clear route to the World Series – all they have to do is win the AL Central. Two more wins against the Royals and they have to beat the Guardians or Tigers in the ALCS.

Things don’t always line up numbers wise. Baseball decisions have to be made, not metric decisions.

“The stat craze allows people who have never really played the game correctly to enter coaching,’’ the baseball man pointed out of what he calls Stat Insanity.

“You can clearly see the affect this has had on the major league level with the number of mental errors and the sad deterioration of the game itself. Yes, they have amazing athletes (but they) make mental errors that should have been eliminated in high school, college or the minor leagues.’’

Mountains of mistakes are made. Simple stuff, like walking off third base when the ball is in play. PFP mistakes like not covering first base.

The way I see it, October is Accountability Month.

Some teams are beginning to recognize that the manager needs to be more than a puppet. Players of the past know that, consider these words from the great Will Clark from the Ricky Cobb podcast, something I had mentioned as well on Rob Dibble’s radio show this week.

Clark said: “(Dusty) Baker is unbelievably knowledged in the game of baseball, and I’m sorry that he had to resign from the Astros, but the reason he did it was ‘cause of the stat nerds; they kept trying to force his hand instead of letting a guy with that much experience run the team. They wanted to run the team. They went back home (Wednesday) because they don’t have the leadership of Dusty Baker.’’

Leadership matters.

Unfortunately for the Phillies, they approached this game as a game in June. Follow the script. Wheeler was at 111 pitches, so he had to come out of the game, they say, even though he allowed only one hit and was dealing. Bob Gibson doesn’t come out of a game like that. The Mets are rolling, and the Phillies had the chance to stop the train, but instead of doing something different they played it safe and put the game in the hands of reliever Jeff Hoffman, following the regular season script and paid dearly for that decision.

They got stuck in the minutia of the minute instead of looking at the big picture, asking one more inning of Wheeler, who was clinging to that one-run lead, thanks to a leadoff home run by Kyle Schwarber, or they could have brought in their closer in the eighth to lock it down.

The Mets offense went for base hits, the Phillies offense went for the big swing.

“Really good at-bats,’’ Carlos Mendoza said. “This is something we’ve done throughout the year. When we are clicking as a team offensively these are some of the things that we do: We put the ball in play, we use the whole field and we’re not thinking too big and we did it today. The situational hitting was really good, a couple of sac flies. Credit to our guys.’’

As Mendoza talked about the offensive success of the Big Inning, did you notice what term he did not use? There was no mention of exit velocity.

Put the ball in play. Use the entire field. Pass the baton.

That is baseball, not metric ball.