It’s Never Over Until It’s Over

Over a couple winters, on an expandable budget, and operating in a come-and-get-me league, Omar Minaya made the Mets into the team that would retake the top of the National League East.

Sadly for him, perhaps, while he revived the art of baseball in Flushing, he neglected to kill the Braves in Atlanta.

This isn’t the Mets’ fault, necessarily. Despite starting rotation issues that would have most general managers scrubbing their eyeballs with a wire brush, Minaya and the Mets have bobbed along almost effortlessly.

They’ve put 13 1/2 games between themselves and the rest of the East with 10 weeks to play, which would sound great if the Braves hadn’t made up a game a week over the last month.

At that rate, the season’s final promotion at Shea Stadium might well be Wire Brush and Goggles Night. If it comes to that, the Mets should be saved by their schedule: As of today’s standings, the Mets will play their final .500-or-better opponent Aug. 24, a Thursday night game against the Cardinals.

It still feels like long odds, but the Braves get six shots at the Mets after Sept. 3, the last three at Turner Field. Considering they are six games out of the wild card, and that four of the teams ahead of them are in the NL West, the Braves could lead that race by mid-August.

“I would not count Atlanta out,” Padres General Manager Kevin Towers said. “I would not want to be Omar right now, even with the lead he has. You get those guys breathing down your neck late, they know how to win.”

In case we needed confirmation that smart organizations hardly ever fall into Pittsburgh-like black holes overnight, even in small and middle markets, by the end of the week the Twins had crept closer to the White Sox than the White Sox were to the Tigers, joining the Braves and The Who in the I-Thought-They-Were-Dead class.

Commissioner Bud Selig will be in Minneapolis tonight to celebrate the coming of the Twins’ new ballpark, kind of sad considering the Twins are 37-11 in the old one, propping up a 29-8 run that should scare the obscenity out of Ozzie Guillen.

Left-handers Johan Santana and Francisco Liriano pitched back to back for a month. While most managers would have split them up earlier, Ron Gardenhire instead rode that near-automatic two-win portion of his rotation to surprising six-week-long momentum and into wild-card contention.

“Everything is going well right now to say the least,” Twins General Manager Terry Ryan said. “We’re on a little bit of a roll and we’re riding it through.”

It’s about the pitching, of course. Santana can be near unhittable, and Liriano can be better.

“I told Johan that I thought he had the best stuff for a left-hander I’d ever seen,” White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski said. “Then I saw Liriano, and he’s better. Johan will probably strike me out again for saying so.”

While we were watching the Mets set up their postseason rotation, the West teams fall all over themselves, the Cardinals be the Cardinals and the Tigers win almost every night, the Twins and Braves became the teams they’d so often been.

The Twins’ last 36 games followed a four-game losing streak, their fifth of at least that long in the season’s first two months. The Braves lost their 10th consecutive game on June 22, hit last place for a while, and are 15-8 since.

Playoff contenders were measuring Twins and Braves, including Torii Hunter, Brad Radke, John Smoltz and Andruw Jones, for uniform sizes. And the Twins and Braves were attentive. But Twins pitchers started getting the ball to Joe Nathan again while Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau toted the offense. Chipper Jones got well in Atlanta, Andruw Jones stayed healthy, and Bobby Cox was able to paste together a pitching staff that still ranks 11th in the National League in earned-run average, 13th in relievers’ ERA.

That’s what the Bob Wickman trade was about, and since his ERA was 5.14 in April, 0.00 in May, 9.00 in June and 0.00 in July, you figure the Braves can use him for the rest of July and then all of September.

So the Braves went from potential sellers to active buyers and, according to assistant general manager Frank Wren, remain on the offensive.

“It’s hard to be optimistic when you lose 10 straight,” he said. “In the seven years I’d been here, that was the most difficult time I’d been through. [General Manager] John Schuerholz has been here 15, and it was the most difficult time he had ever gone through. We were continuing to try to get through it, but it wasn’t easy. All along we thought our everyday lineup was good enough, and if we just got reliable pitching, we’d be able to compete. And that’s really what has happened.”

Occasionally, Wren said, they’d wonder if it might be wiser to plan for next season.

“Sure,” he said. “You have to be realistic. Things were not going very well. I don’t think we ever stepped completely out of ‘06, but we had to start looking in that direction.”

Though their run of 14 consecutive division titles probably won’t grow, contention appears to be upon them again. Aided by a league that lacks a strong team beyond the Mets and Cardinals, they’ve played themselves back.

It is the mark of organizational depth, and organizational savvy, and it doesn’t surprise Towers at all.

“It’s a mind-set,” Towers said. “They don’t even look at where they’re at. They’re just thinking, ‘When are we going to turn it around?’ Those two organizations, they don’t panic.”

The Twins arrive at their most crucial week of the first four months. On Monday, they open a three-game series against the White Sox in Chicago. The Tigers come to Minnesota after that. Depending on how the Twins manipulate their rotation around Thursday’s day off, Santana could pitch in both series, and Liriano could pitch the first game against Detroit.

Yeah, it’s a long way back, but the hard part looks about over.