Mets Love Their Ghost of a Chance

Held triumphantly overhead by a young lady in the twilight at Shea Stadium Saturday, the sign read:

“Yo, Chipper, Get Ready to Get Chopped.”

She could easily have been speaking for her favorite team.

Make no mistake, this is what the New York Mets wanted.

They wanted another crack at the Team of the Decade.

They wanted the Atlanta Braves as much as they want the Yankees in a Subway World Series, although that may be an embellishment.

“This is special,” relief pitcher Turk Wendell said amid the champagne showers in the Mets’ clubhouse after they had eliminated the Arizona Diamondbacks in four games of the division series, “but it will be that much more special once we beat the Braves.”

Fighting words?

Well, the Mets get a chance to make it happen starting Tuesday in the National League’s championship series at Turner Field.

And if the Braves are now saying they expected the Mets to be here all along, well, that’s not what the Mets thought they heard from the Braves when they last played.

They thought they heard adrenaline-stoked John Rocker saying how much he hated the Mets. They thought they heard Rocker and others saying the Mets were dead.

Of course, at that point in the last week of the regular season, the Mets did appear dead--eliminated from the Eastern Division race and virtually out of wild-card hope.

They had been swept by the Braves in a three-game series in Atlanta as Chipper Jones all but sewed up the National League’s award for most valuable player. They had lost seven in a row before winning the middle game of another three-game series with the Braves, who won two of those three games in the next-to-last series of the regular season.

Now?

Well, as Met Manager Bobby Valentine said Saturday after the riveting victory over Arizona: “The next team we play is going to be playing against ghosts because they said we were dead. I don’t know if they ever played against people coming back from the grave.”

The Mets came back by sweeping the Pittsburgh Pirates on the final weekend of the regular season, routing the Cincinnati Reds in the wild-card playoff and ousting Arizona by first beating Randy Johnson and then winning two in a row at Shea Stadium without an injured Mike Piazza.

“Our heart’s still pumping,” the catalytic Rickey Henderson said amid Saturday’s celebration. “The Braves left the last time and felt we were no match for them. They felt we were dead and wouldn’t get the opportunity to see them again. I’m real happy to see them again. We’re coming back alive.”

They are coming back with seven wins in their last eight games.

They are coming back with people named Todd Pratt and Melvin Mora and Benny Agbayani helping to sustain the momentum.

“You couldn’t write a better script,” said Piazza, whose swollen thumb prevented him from gripping a bat Saturday but didn’t stop him from handling a bottle of champagne. “We’re not about one person. We’re getting contributions from everybody, and that’s what it takes to win in the postseason.

“Everyone in the National League knows that to reach the World Series you have to go through Atlanta. It’s the one hurdle people will be looking at us to get over and wondering if we can, but I think we can. We’ve become a different team than the one that last played Atlanta. Maybe the best thing that happened to us was that we got all of that negative energy out of here. We hit bottom and bounced back. Now we’re relaxed and riding a wave.”

Of course, dude, it’s a long way between rhetoric and reality, and the Braves know all about riding a wave. They’ve won eight straight division titles. They won nine of 12 from the Mets during the regular season and three in a row from the Houston Astros after losing the opener of their division series. They have Greg Maddux, Kevin Millwood, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz set to throw their Cy Young awards at the Mets.

(OK, Millwood hasn’t won one yet but this year’s voting hasn’t been announced yet.)

The smart thing might be for the Mets to temper their cockiness and leave the “Yo, Chipper” signs at home, but who wouldn’t be a little giddy at having produced a second life? Valentine hugged dapper co-owner Fred Wilpon Saturday and said, “Ain’t it great? And we’re just getting started.”

Perhaps. The Mets did get team-wide contributions against Arizona, and starters Al Leiter, Rick Reed, Kenny Rogers and Masato Yoshii, who is expected to start Tuesday, have probably never been in better form during a season that has now produced 100 wins.

Then there’s Valentine, of whom a top Atlanta scout said Sunday, “You can say anything you want about his ego and his mouth, and it would probably be accurate, but he knows how to run a game. He has the right people in the right place at the right time, and he has the Mets at the top of their game despite everything they went through earlier. Sparky Anderson would say a lot of things, and you knew he was trying to take the pressure off his players and put it on himself. Maybe that’s Bobby’s motivation, although Sparky never went as far with the things he said as Bobby does.”

The latest “ill-timed fire,” as General Manager Steve Phillips put it, involved a Sports Illustrated profile that was released before Game 3 of the division series with the Diamondbacks. Valentine was quoted as saying that he had five losers in the clubhouse and not a lot of intelligent players. He held a clubhouse meeting before that game and said he was sorry if he offended anyone but “if the shoe fits, wear it.”

“We’re obviously going to keep hearing a lot about that in the next week,” Met center fielder Darryl Hamilton said in the clubhouse Saturday, “but we’ve come too far to worry about it, talk about it, or lose sleep over what he says or what he thinks. We’re still playing and the guys are still believing.”

A special group of guys, the victorious Valentine said Saturday of the same group he had described as lacking intelligence and being losers.

Whichever and whatever, the Mets head to Atlanta as division series winners. They are alive, well and playing the team they wanted to be playing.

NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES

ATLANTA

vs. NEW YORK

Game 1

Tuesday at Atlanta, 5 p.m., Channel 4

SAVING GRACE

New to the closer role, John Rocker has stepped up when the Braves needed him most.

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