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Mariners vs. Yankees |
Mets vs. Cardinals
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Saturday, October 14
Benes keeps Cardinals off endangered list
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- They had to win. It was that basic.
They had to win, or the fun was over for the St. Louis Cardinals.
They had to win, and the only thing that stood between them and the first tee was Andy Benes.
He is not to be confused with Pedro. He is not to be confused with John Smoltz. He is not to be confused with the muy bueno Hernandez brothers.
Andy Benes had never won a postseason game when he took the mound Saturday at Shea Stadium. Not with the Padres. Not with the Mariners. Not with the Diamondbacks. Not with the Cardinals. Not once in a 12-year big-league career. Not once in six postseason starts or one relief appearance.
But if Andy Benes was going to pick a day to win that first one, he picked the right day. He picked Saturday in Shea to go eight innings, giving up only six hits and two runs. He picked Saturday in Shea to beat the New York Mets 8-2.
Now they're alive because of him. And he's alive because of them.
"I'm just thankful for the opportunity," Benes said afterward, wearing an ice pack on a swollen right knee that was almost as big as the Empire State Building. "It was a neat to get the opportunity to pitch in a game this big, in a great arena, in New York. I wouldn't trade it for anything."
Technically, the National League Championship Series would not have been over if the Cardinals had lost Saturday. But if you believe the Cardinals were coming back from the wrong end of three games to none with two more games to play in New York, you believe Al Franken can be elected president.
"You don't want to be in New York, down three-oh," Will Clark said. "I'll tell you that."
You betcha. Mathematically, the Cardinals might still have been breathing. Practically speaking, it would have been time to draw up the Christmas shopping list had they lost Saturday, because winter was just around the bend.
So they had to win. And Andy Benes won.
"These guys needed a lift," Clark said. "And he gave us a lift."
Oh, he did have help. He had a 2-0 lead before this game was four hitters old. He had a 4-1 lead after three innings and an 8-2 lead after five innings. His teammates got 14 hits off Rick Reed and the heretofore-invincible Mets bullpen.
The top four hitters in the St. Louis lineup went 7-for-17, with five RBI and four runs scored. And after getting three hits with runners in scoring position in the first two games (3 for 27), the Cardinals got six Saturday (6 for 13).
But there was no better story on this day than Benes, a man in whom most occupants of the world had little faith. And who could blame them?
Two months ago, he was on the disabled list, thinking his season was over. The cartilage in his knee was shot. The surgeons were sharpening their scalpel. Asked if he was worried the big baseball highway would never lead him where it led him Saturday, Benes laughed.
"Yeah," he said. "From about August on. I wouldn't even be pitching if I didn't get this brace. It relieves the pressure on the outside of the knee. But I didn't know then if it would help. I had cartilage damage, so it can't heal. I've got to get it taken care of. But they said, 'Take a couple of weeks off and see how you feel.' "
So he took those couple of weeks. Then he began to try it out in some simulated games, just to see what happened.
"It felt better each time out," Benes said. "I had a lot of rest. Then, in the simulated games, I faced Coach (Bob) Knight. I faced my brother. They were going to put Eddie from the kitchen in there to face me next, I think."
But he felt good enough to pitch in relief a couple of times in early September and then rejoined the rotation September 21. He didn't figure there were even any vacancies in the postseason rotation at the time. But Garrett Stephenson's elbow went. Rick Ankiel's sonar blew a fuse. And so, Saturday, there he was.
His knee still swells so relentlessly that he has to have the fluid drained before every start. So Friday night, the team doctor came to his hotel room to drain it.
"I don't know how sanitary that is," Benes chuckled. "But I made my wife watch. I didn't want to have her listen to me complain about it all the time without watching it to know what I go through. She's not good with needles. So she was fanning herself a few times there."
Jennifer Benes survived, though. And so did her husband.
His team made it easy for him in many ways. But these are the playoffs. It's never easy.
So he went to the mound with a 2-0 lead. Next thing he knew, there was nobody out in the bottom of the first, Mets on first and third, and Mr. Michael Piazza waving a bat.
But Piazza thunked a bouncer to third base. Fernando Tatis turned it into a 5-4-3 double play. The Mets' best chance died. And that, Clark said, "is called damage control."
Later, in the fourth inning, there was one more moment just like it. Bases loaded. No outs. The dangerous Jay Payton at the plate. And as Benes caught his breath, he heard Shea Stadium, about ready to rattle the neighborhood Richter scales.
"You could kind of sense right there that the crowd thought something big was going to happen," Benes said.
Well, something big happened, all right. But it was something big for the Cardinals.
Benes threw Payton a slider -- "and to tell you the truth," he said, "I don't know if it was a good slider or a bad slider. I just know he hit it right at the second baseman (Fernando Vina). And he turned it into a great double play."
Another Mets rally disappeared. The Cardinals hung onto a 5-2 lead. Then they put it away with three runs off reliever Rick White in the fifth.
And Andy Benes did the rest.
He gave up one hit over the last 4 1/3 innings. He threw nothing but zeroes up there. He saved the bullpen. He even survived all the abuse he had to take for the headfirst "slide" he'd made at home plate while scoring the Cardinals' fifth run of the day.
Except that "slide" wouldn't truly describe what he did. A more accurate description would probably be: "crash landing."
"Aw, geez," Clark shrieked. "I told him, 'Do not do that again. You're making all the position players have heart attacks.' "
"Hey, I can't slide because of my knee," Benes said. "So I dove. I know it was ugly. The guys in the dugout were all over me. I said, 'I'm just trying to score. Count it as a point.' But at least I knew it was ugly. The problem would be if I thought it was good."
One wise guy told him the Russian judge had scored it an 8.2.
"I'll take that," Benes said. "But the guy must be blind."
And anyone who couldn't see what this game meant to Benes must be blind himself.
Last October, you might recall, he played for a team from Arizona that also faced the Mets in the playoffs. Except last year, he was never allowed to pitch.
"I came here last year and had the same locker," he said. "I always have this locker when I come to New York. But I never got the opportunity to pitch. I was very disappointed. I felt like I pitched pretty well the second half of the season. I won nine games the second half. And you never want to get to the playoffs and then not get to play.
"But the way I looked at it, it wasn't a decision I made. I was just looking for an opportunity. But I had that opportunity this time."
Of course, he still had to do something with that opportunity. And that was no given, either.
There had been other opportunities in postseasons past -- in 1995 with the Mariners, in 1996 with the Cardinals. None of them ever turned out the way Saturday did. So Andy Benes kept waiting, hoping for one more chance.
"I grew up in southern Indiana," he said. "So I knew that Don Mattingly didn't get his first opportunity until his 13th year -- and his last year. And when he did, I happened to be on the other side. I never like to give up a home run. But he hit a home run off me in Yankee Stadium, and I recognized that was a really exciting moment.
"It wasn't a great moment for me. But the greatness of the moment was the response from the people in Yankee Stadium gave to that man for 13 years of laying it on the line for them. I'll never forget that. His home run tied the score, and I think everyone in Yankee Stadium who had a beverage at the time threw it -- because they delayed the game. So Lou Piniella pulled our team off the field. Then everyone went back, and I was on my way out there, too, when they said, 'Hey, get back here,' cause I was done.
"But it was a great baseball game. You see it on ESPN Classic sometimes. And I say, 'Hey, I was actually in that game.'"
But he didn't win that game. He did win this game -- a game that kept his team off the endangered-franchise list. But amazingly, Benes said he was "probably more relaxed in this game than any start all year."
"Hey, pressure is when you don't know where you're going to sleep tonight," he said. "Pressure is if you don't know if you're going to have food to eat. So having a bad knee and having the opportunity to pitch in a big playoff game for a great team -- that's not pressure."
Which isn't to say that, in retrospect, what he did in this game wasn't one of the greatest moments of his life. Because it was.
"It was really neat to have a chance to go out there and pitch well in a game we really needed to win," he said. "It was exciting just to be part of that game, with this group of guys. This is a special group. They fight hard from the first inning to the ninth inning. So it's very gratifying to do well in a game like this.
"This," said Benes, "was one of the most satisfying days of my career."
They had to win. They won. He had to win. He won.
The Cardinals got to put off last rites. Andy Benes got to put off knee surgery. And they're both grateful.
"Hopefully," he said, "we can put it off now for a couple more weeks."
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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