A Weekend Decades In The Making Begins With The New York Mets Partying Like It’s 1999

The narrative of the weekend understandably wasn’t anywhere on Pete Alonso’s mind as he stepped to the plate in the ninth inning Friday night.

After all, Alonso was three years old when the Mets started wearing their black alternate uniforms in 1998, four years old when the black uniforms became synonymous with dramatic comeback wins and the sound of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” pouring out of the loudspeakers at Shea Stadium and somewhere between four and seven years old when Mike Piazza delivered his biggest hits for the Mets.

But snatching dramatic victories from the jaws of damaging defeats — after sticking their heads into the gaping jaws of the hungry lions — is in the Mets’ collective DNA. And what better time to produce such a victory than to open the first weekend in a generation in which the Mets will actually celebrate their history instead of ignoring it?

“Everybody has that ability — whether you can tap into it is another thing,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said after Alonso’s walk-off RBI single lifted the Mets past the Rockies, 7-6. “When momentum changes, we talk about it all the time and they talk about it all the time. Just stay in the moment. OK, whatever happened happened. You can’t do anything about it. Let’s go ahead and move to the next challenge. They’ve done that all year.

“The job description requires it here.”

Especially on the Queens side of the RFK Bridge. While Friday’s win didn’t come with the stakes of the season-long emergence from laughingstock status in 1969 and lacked the high drama that accompanied comebacks in the 1986 playoffs, it surely felt awfully familiar to any of the dozen members of the 1999 team — the best Mets squad since the 1986 champions — scheduled to attend Old-Timers Day this afternoon. It’s the Mets’ first Old-Timers Day since 1994.

With little margin for error in their playoff race, the Mets squandered a late-inning lead against the last-place Rockies. The Mets were down 6-4 and four outs away from their NL East lead over the Braves — once as large as 10 1/2 games — shrinking to a game when Darin Ruf reached on an error and Jeff McNeil walked before laconic Californian Mark Canha hit the game-tying double down the third base line.

“Playing with a lot of confident right now and it’s easier at times throughout the course of the season — like right now, when I got up there for my last at-bat, I just kind of felt like I was going to do something big,” said Canha, who hit the game-tying and go-ahead homers to help the Mets overcome a pair of multi-run deficits in a 10-9 win over the Phillies on Sunday afternoon.

“Trying to hit a home run and put us up. But we’ll take the double.”

Such a dry assessment could have easily been uttered by Robin Ventura, the native Californian who had a knack for delivering in the clutch while collecting 120 RBIs in 1999, including the walk-off single to lift the Mets to a 3-2, 11-inning win over the sub-.500 Pirates on Oct. 1, 1999.

That win — in which the Mets blew a 2-0 eighth-inning lead against an 83-loss team — began a final weekend surge into the playoffs for the Mets, who overcame a two-game deficit in the wild card race to force a one-game playoffs with the Reds, whom they beat 6-0 to advance to the NL Division series against…the Diamondbacks, managed by Showalter.

(As a reminder of Father Time’s inexorable march, the first run Friday was produced via a solo homer by Mets third baseman Brett Baty, who was born Nov. 13, 1999 — 27 days AFTER Ventura’s Grand Slam Single extended the 1999 NLCS)

In the ninth inning, the Mets parlayed Daniel Bard’s four-pitch walk of Brandon Nimmo and a plunking of Starling Marte into the game-winning rally.

“In that ninth inning, I felt the same thing for my teammates,” Canha said. “It’s like ‘We’re gonna win this thing. I know it. We’re gonna do it.’ There was that vibe in the dugout that, OK, we’re gonna do this right now.”

After Francisco Lindor lined out to left, Alonso hit a single past diving shortstop Garrett Hampson to score Nimmo and register his 105th RBI, 19 shy of the team record set by Piazza in 1999, and give the Mets their 26th comeback win.

“The festivities are great and all,” Alonso said. “But I was just really focused on being locked in and winning the game. Just trying to do the best I could in the moment.”

Alonso’s walk-off RBI left him a more active participant in the ensuing celebration than a dazed Piazza following game no. 162 in 1999, when Piazza was at the plate as Brad Clontz’s wild pitch skipped away and allowed Melvin Mora to score the game-winning run against the Pirates.

But the ability of Alonso — whose 137 homers are the fourth-most by a Mets player since 1999 behind only David Wright (242), Piazza (197) and Carlos Beltran (149) — to resist the urge to swing for the fences and deliver a less booming but no less timely hit evoked memories of Piazza’s knack for producing similar moments.

“Can you imagine having that type of power at your fingertips and in your ability and (to) be able to kind of give in a little bit and try to deliver what the team needs?” Showalter said. “He’s not sneaking up on anybody. They see that 100 up there and they know what he’s capable of doing. So he gets everybody’s best shot.”

As the Mets descended upon Alonso near second base, the “Mojo rising” refrain from “L.A. Woman,” the song selected by Ventura as the victory song in 1999, blared out from the speakers before bleeding into “Takin’ Care Of Business,” a more modern post-victory staple.

Afterward, Alonso lingered in the clubhouse with starting pitcher Taijuan Walker and set-up man Trevor May, a reminder of the uncommon bond the ’99 team had with one another both on and off the field.

“I think there’s just that general feeling in the dugout when it’s crunch time,” Canha said. “Nothing needs to be said. It’s just kind of looking around (and saying) OK, time to go to work here and finish this game. Whether it goes in our favor or not, we’re going to play until the last out’s made and we’re going to keep grinding until the end.

“It’s just kind of our thing.”

It was then and it is now.