A Knight Turns the Mets Into Kings : Yet Another Rally Beats Boston, 8-5

Redemption, at least in New England, will remain a subject for the Calvinists in the pulpit instead of the Calvin Schiraldis in the bullpen.

Let the poets ponder the fate of the Boston Red Sox, baseball’s most enticing losers.

Monday night at Shea Stadium, a crowd of 55,032 paid homage to baseball’s kings, the New York Mets, who play in Queens and will take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too, after coming from behind to beat the Red Sox, 8-5, in the seventh game of the 83rd World Series.

Three generations of Kennedys have been in the public eye since the Red Sox last won a World Series, in 1918. Ted Williams fought in two wars but never won a Series. Carl Yastrzemski played in three decades, and he never won one, either.

And Monday night, neither did the Red Sox of 1986. The team that lost a two-run lead one strike away from winning Game 6 lost a 3-0 lead 12 outs away from winning Game 7.

In the end, the Mets, who won 108 regular-season games and came from behind in three of their four National League playoff victories over the Houston Astros, showed enough mettle to come back one last time against the Red Sox.

“We were saying on the bench that if we tie this game up we’ll beat ‘em, and it worked out that way,” Met first baseman Keith Hernandez said. A bases-loaded, two-run single by Hernandez in the sixth was the first sign that Red Sox starter Bruce Hurst, working on three days’ rest, was finally cracking.

A moment later, Gary Carter’s floater into right field dropped in front of a diving Dwight Evans, the score was tied, and Hurst--who had beaten the Mets twice before in the Series--was soon history.

An inning later, so were the Red Sox, after Schiraldi--harshly called a choker by Darryl Strawberry when he failed to close out the Mets Saturday with two out and nobody on in the 10th--came undone at the sight of the first Met he faced, Ray Knight.

Knight, bitter when he was benched for Game 2 against Roger Clemens only a week before, drove a Schiraldi fastball just over the fence, giving the Mets a lead they would never give back.

Knight was later named the Most Valuable Player of the Series.

The next batter, Len Dykstra, singled. Schiraldi threw a wild pitch, and Rafael Santana singled Dykstra home. It was 5-3, and Boston Manager John McNamara was forced to remove Schiraldi. Hernandez’s sacrifice fly off Joe Sambito made it 6-3.

“I’m sure I’ll hear about it, there’s no doubt about that,” said Schiraldi, who rose from the minors in midsummer as an unexpected savior, only to head into winter as an unforgettable heartbreaker.

“There’s nothing I can do. I can’t change it. I’m just going to have to live with it.”

The Mets, who had exploited their bullpen superiority in the playoffs against Houston, were banking on breaking the Boston bullpen, too.

“Once we got Hurst out of there we had ‘em right where we wanted ‘em,” Hernandez said. “They have a right-handed bullpen, and we had our big boys coming up.”

The Red Sox, who were here only because of their totally implausible comeback against the Angels in Game 5 of the American League playoffs at Anaheim, mounted one last run at the Mets in the eighth.

Bill Buckner, whose 10th-inning error Saturday was rewarded by a standing ovation from the partisan Met crowd during pregame introductions Monday night, lined an opposite-field single off Met reliever Roger McDowell.

Jim Rice followed with another base hit, and Dwight Evans--who along with Rich Gedman hit consecutive home runs in Boston’s three-run second inning against Met starter Ron Darling--whistled a double into the alley in right-center, scoring two runs.

Out came Met Manager Davey Johnson. Into the game came Met reliever Jesse Orosco, winner of three games in the playoffs but now feeling the effects of a strep throat infection.

“I wasn’t thinking too much about baseball when I came in,” Orosco said. “I was looking for a bathroom. I was a little nervous.

“But I knew the situation. I just said to myself, ‘Maintain yourself. This is no time to fold.’ ”

On the Red Sox bench, the thoughts turned to one last comeback. Gedman lined out hard to second for one out, but the next batter was Dave Henderson, a playoff hero with one home run, a should-have-been Series hero with the go-ahead home run he’d hit in Game 6.

Orosco struck out Henderson with breaking pitches, and Don Baylor, the designated hitter rendered all but useless in New York by the rules that wouldn’t allow his inclusion in the lineup, bounced out to shortstop while pinch-hitting for Spike Owen.

“It was the wrong ending to the storybook year I had since coming over,” said Henderson, who didn’t come to Boston until an August trade with Seattle.

“Everything was going so right. I kind of expected it to end with me doing something great and us winning it.

“But it didn’t happen that way, and I guess I’ve got to live with it.”

There was no better team in baseball this season at finishing off the kill than the Mets, and Game 7 was no exception. Strawberry, who hadn’t driven in a run the entire Series, led off the eighth with a majestic home run off Red Sox reliever Al Nipper. Orosco, of all people, singled in another.

The mounted cops were in place by the ninth, when Orosco retired Ed Romero on a foul pop-up, got Wade Boggs on a bouncer to second and struck out Marty Barrett to bring the Mets their first world title since 1969, when they were merely Amazin’.

That one, in ‘69, was a shocker. This was expected, at least by everyone outside of Boston.

Hernandez was a winner in a World Series once before, in 1982 with the St. Louis Cardinals, when he went hitless in the first four games, then had seven hits and eight runs batted in the last three.

“There’s no comparison,” he said. “That was my first one, so it was very special.

“But to be traded here, with everything that went along with the trade, to a club that was a last-place team for almost a decade, to turn it around in three years and win a world championship . . . this is the greatest feeling of my career.”

In the Boston clubhouse, right-fielder Evans was living an experience over again, too. He was with the Red Sox in 1975, on a team that also had a 3-0 lead in Game 7, only to lose, 4-3, to the Cincinnati Reds on a ninth-inning hit by Joe Morgan.

“I really don’t care about 1975,” Evans said. “(The Mets’) style of baseball is good, they’ve got a great team, but I think we’re a better team.

“I don’t want to hold my head high. I’m a loser right now. But I don’t want to put my head down, either. I want to hold it straight, because I know the effort each and every guy in this clubhouse made.”

In another corner of the Red Sox clubhouse, Schiraldi was contemplating his own flawed effort.

“To know you’ve let down guys who’ve been around 10 or 15 years, to let them down when they could have been world champions . . . I didn’t do the job I was supposed to do,” he said.

For the Red Sox, as always, the job remains undone--perhaps for another three generations to come.

For the Mets, however, this was the culmination of all they set out to do, even if there were those who accused them of a distasteful arrogance along the way.

“When you win 116 games in a year, you’re a good ballclub,” Johnson said. “We will get better. This Series taught us a lot.

“A lot of our guys will get better from it . . . Ron Darling, Darryl Strawberry, even Bob Ojeda . . . (Dwight) Gooden has a lot to prove next year.

“We will get better because we have an influx of young talent. It is a trend we have set. This Series was a growing-up period for a lot of our guys.”