Braves Derail Subway Series

ATLANTA — Hanging to the precipice, the New York Mets had been infused with a new sense of their resiliency and immortality by the victories over the Atlanta Braves in Games 4 and 5 of the National League championship series.

They were coming back from the grave again. They were returning to Georgia convinced that fate and destiny shared their charter.

Well, destiny turned to dust Tuesday night. The magic finally expired. The Mets were finally left dead and buried, but not before they had the Braves seeing ghosts again, not before they again underscored the meaning of heart.

The Mets lost, 10-9, in an 11-inning encore to Sunday’s 15-inning thriller.

The Braves, winning a fifth National League pennant in the ‘90s, advance to a Team of the Decade confrontation with the New York Yankees in the World Series.

The Mets, who came back from 5-0 against Kevin Millwood and 7-3 against John Smoltz, face a long winter of bittersweet memories.

Relief pitcher John Franco, a Met for 10 years, reflected on the lost leads of 8-7 and 9-8 following the comeback and said, “Right now it’s very frustrating and very demoralizing, but we had our backs to the wall and came back like champions. Everyone in this room should be proud. So many people counted us out the last 2 1/2 weeks.”

So many people counted the Mets out when they lost seven consecutive games during the final two weeks of the regular season and when they lost the first three games of this series.

No team in postseason history had come back from 0-3 to force a seventh game, let alone win, but the Mets were within two outs of creating a seventh game when the Braves tied it at 9-9 on Ozzie Guillen’s single in the 10th and won it on Andruw Jones’ bases-loaded walk in the 11th.

“Exhilarating,” General Manager John Schuerholz said as he waited for an elevator that would take him to the champagne celebration in the Atlanta clubhouse.

If that has become a ritual, it is still one the Braves soak up, and particularly this year when they had the best record in baseball and are still playing in the postseason despite the loss of Andres Galarraga, Javy Lopez and Kerry Ligtenberg, among others.

Now they have another chance to make a claim to the Team of the Decade against the leading challenger to that label.

The Braves are often criticized for having won only one World Series title in the ‘90s despite eight division championships and the four previous pennants, but Schuerholz said he is not into labels and that the Braves have nothing to prove.

“We’re one of only four teams in history to win 100 games for three straight years,” he said. “We’ve have the highest win percentage in the ‘90s, eight division championships and now five pennants. I think all of that is a much more meaningful criteria than any other statistic.

“I mean, we’re frustrated and disappointed not to have won more World Series titles because we have clubs that were good enough to do it, but how can you not be proud and satisfied with what we’ve accomplished. Just getting to the World Series is the biggest challenge. We’ve now played in the LCS eight times in the decade against seven different opponents.

“If it was so easy, you’d think we would have played the same opponent three or four times or at least two or three times. If it’s so simple, you would think somebody else would have figured out how to do it. That’s another pretty good criteria of what we’ve done.”