King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Baseball fans are used to collapses lately, but the Mets' pratfall is something special. Plus: Rockies top Philly comeback, force playoff with Padres.

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Oct. 1, 2007 | Let's not soft-soap it. The collapse of the New York Mets was ignominious and exhaustive. There are various ways of measuring whether a losing team's disintegration was the worst -- or, from the other perspective, whether the winner's comeback was the best -- of all time, but any way you look at it, the Mets are right up there.

We're getting to be connoisseurs of collapse, we baseball fans. Last year the St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers met in the World Series after both had nearly missed the playoffs because of epic September swan dives. The 2005 Chicago White Sox almost gagged away their playoff spot before holding on and then going all the way.

In 2004 the New York Yankees had a 3-0 lead over the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, and you may have heard a thing or two about what happened next.

Coincidence? Or is there something about the current state of baseball that engenders late-season pratfalls by leading teams?

Or perhaps the Mets were trying to capture some of that White Sox/Cardinals late-season swoon to World Series title mojo and simply miscalculated.

They led the Philadelphia Phillies by seven games with 17 to go, then they went 5-11 while the Phillies were going a very good but not spectacular 12-4, leaving the teams tied atop the National League East Sunday morning, the last day of the season, each playing a home game against a division rival with a losing record.

But wait, it's worse than that. The Mets downfall included three straight wins over the Florida Marlins last week, an apparent righting of the ship that left them two and a half games up with seven to play. Then they didn't win again till Saturday, when, having fallen a game behind Friday, they pulled back into a tie with the Phillies by pounding the Marlins 13-0.

The Mets started their game at home Sunday against the Marlins a few minutes before the Phillies started theirs at home against the Washington Nationals.

By the time the Phillies took the field, the Marlins had KO'd Tom Glavine and taken a 7-0 lead. If you're going to go down, you might as well get the style points for going down in flames. The Marlins coasted to an 8-1 win in front of an increasingly glum assemblage at Shea Stadium. Two Mets fans and a horse walk up to the concession stand. Hey, guys, why the long faces?

A few minutes after that game ended, Brett Myers struck out Wily Mo Pena in Philadelphia, then flung his glove into the air and waited for his playmates to join him for an underdog pile. Measured this way or that, the 1964 Phillies set the gold standard for late-season collapses, and now the 2007 version had done the opposite.

Next page: The Colorado Rockies comeback: Even better