September 29, 2007, should have been one of those Mets games people still talk about every September. Instead, it became a cruel footnote - the kind of afternoon that looked like salvation in the moment and meant almost nothing by the next night.
At Shea Stadium, with more than 54,600 fans in the paid crowd, John Maine turned in the kind of start that can carry a season. He worked 7.2 innings on 115 pitches and completely controlled the Florida Marlins, even if the strikeout-to-walk line never looked quite as clean as the dominance did on the field. Maine ran into plenty of deep counts - nine of them, in fact - and still finished with 68 strikes against 47 balls, two walks, and 14 strikeouts.
Florida barely put the ball in play with any force. The Marlins finished with just one hit, and it came on the final batter Maine faced. Paul Hoover hit a weak grounder to David Wright, but it didn’t get to him in time and went as an infield single, wiping away what would have been the first no-hitter in Mets history.
That lone blemish didn’t change the feel of the day. The Mets backed Maine with an explosion at the plate, rolling to a 13-0 win. Lastings Milledge hit two home runs, Luis Castillo went 3-for-3, and New York piled up 19 hits while scoring in every inning except the fourth.
For a few hours, the standings felt manageable again. The Mets had entered the day trailing the Philadelphia Phillies by one game in the NL East, and Philadelphia lost, leaving the division race level for a day. The 7-game lead with 17 games left had turned into a stalemate, at least temporarily.
The whole thing took 3 hours and 3 minutes, which made the final score feel even more surreal. It looked like the kind of afternoon that could stop a collapse in its tracks. Instead, it became one more Mets performance that vanished into the larger disaster - remembered less for what it accomplished than for how quickly it was swallowed up by what came next.
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