Sunday showdown showcases ‘madness’ of new format

What has been such a surprising and dramatic and pretty wonderful weekend of October baseball comes to a fitting ending on Sunday night, like it’s the last game of the first weekend of March Madness. We get the only Game 3 of the first round of baseball’s postseason tournament, the Mets against the Padres at Citi Field. And all that jazz. It was the late Jim Valvano who first talked about “survive and advance” in college basketball’s postseason tournament. The Mets and Padres try to do that on Sunday night.

They play to keep playing. This is the way the Wild Card round had to end in baseball, with a game like this after a weekend like this.

We’ve already had a 15-inning game won by the Guardians over the Rays, one that a kid named Oscar Gonzalez ended by sending one over the left-field wall at Progressive Field off a former Cleveland ace named Corey Kluber. We then had one of the great postseason comebacks of them all in Toronto, the Mariners coming all the way back from 8-1 down to beat the Blue Jays, 10-9.

On Friday, the Fightin’ Phils of Rob Thomson came back to score six in the 9th against the Cardinals, then finished off their two-game sweep on Saturday night, but not before both Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina had gotten hits in the final at-bats of their careers.

That was happening about the same time the Mets were keeping their season alive, at home in front of a Citi Field crowd crazy with noise, in a Game 2 filled with tension and drama even after the Mets had taken a 7-2 lead. If you watched, you know: Game 3 wasn't locked in until Seth Lugo got Josh Bell to ground out with the bases loaded in the top of the ninth.

All year long, the Mets had gotten contributions up and down their lineup, all the way to when the trumpets would blare for Edwin Díaz as he made his way out of the bullpen. It was that way last night when the season was on the line. Their stars all lined up: Jacob deGrom, Francisco Lindor (home run in the first) and Pete Alonso (home run to put the Mets ahead for good at 3-2). Finally, there was Díaz , whom manager Buck Showalter brought out of the bullpen for the top of the seventh, pitching through the Padres’ best hitters until two were out in the eighth.

When asked about bringing in Díaz as early as he did, Showalter said, “We kind of had to get this one under our belts.”

deGrom’s work, after his fine outing on Saturday night, is over for this series. And if the Padres win Game 3, maybe his Mets career is over, as he has indicated he will opt out of his contract to become a free agent after the season. If that is the way it does play out, then he went out in great style on Saturday night, in what could turn out to be the first and last postseason game he has ever pitched at home.

But everybody else from Saturday night will be there on this big baseball night in New York: Lindor and Alonso and Díaz, who made it sound as if he’s ready to pitch as long as Showalter needs him in Game 3. Manny Machado and Josh Bell, both of whom hit homers off Max Scherzer on Friday night in Game 1, will be there for the Padres and so will Juan Soto, all of them trying to get a fresh start against the Dodgers, who beat them by 22 games in the National League West this season.

“Winner-take-all tomorrow,” Padres manager Bob Melvin said on Saturday night, talking about a deciding game that feels as if it earns the winner a lot more than an all-expenses trip to Hollywood.

“This is why we came,” Mets Game 3 starter Chris Bassitt said. “This is why we built the group that we built for the playoffs.”

The Mets and Padres try to win a game that gets one of them to Tuesday. Knockout baseball at Citi Field, this time for both teams, after the Rays and Jays and Cardinals got knocked out on Saturday.

Now it's the Mets and Padres trying to play their way into the Elite 8. October Madness in baseball. After a first weekend of the baseball tournament like the one we’ve seen already, one in which you already feel a little bit of everything has already happened, we get a game like this in New York. Money on the table. Survive and advance.