Valentine, Mets Can’t Put Cap on Their Level of Frustration

As the fireworks went off in response to a sixth-inning home run by Eddie Perez on Wednesday, so did Bobby Valentine.

The New York Met manager flung down his cap and kicked it to the other end of the visiting dugout at Ted Turner Field.

The cap took a beating, but Valentine was really kicking himself for failing to remove Kenny Rogers from the inning in which the Atlanta Braves rallied from a 2-0 deficit for four runs and a 4-3 victory.

The loss sent the Mets back to New York trailing 2-0 in the National League’s championship series and Mike Piazza, among others, confounded by Atlanta’s ongoing domination.

“Sometimes I can’t understand the way the game is,” he said. “Every time we play them close they find a way to beat us, but we can’t find a way to beat them.

“You can drive yourself crazy trying to deal with it, but just because we’ve had some teeth kicked in doesn’t mean we won’t keep going out there until we either turn it around or don’t have any teeth left.”

The dentist could be on call when the series resumes in New York on Friday night. The Braves have won 11 of 14 games against the Mets this year and need only two more to reach the World Series.

Wednesday represented a root canal for the Mets.

It started with Kevin Millwood, a Cy Young Award candidate, on the mound for Atlanta and finished with John Smoltz, a Cy Young Award winner who will start Game 4, pitching a flawless ninth for the save. In between, closer John Rocker was summoned in the eighth to face two left-handed hitters he has owned, John Olerud and Robin Ventura, and struck out both.

Ultimately, however, it was a six-pitch sequence delivered by Rogers in that sixth inning that did as much to hurt the Mets as the heat and finesse dispensed by Millwood, Rocker and Smoltz. As Rogers said:

“Their pitching is so good that you can’t afford even one bad inning. In these games you don’t have the luxury to let an inning get out of control.”

It happened in a hurry, but Valentine had Turk Wendell ready in the bullpen, said he was close to lifting Rogers, and added, “I should have done it. There’s no doubt about it. I had no reason to keep him in, but I did, and it was absolutely the wrong move.”

Nursing a 2-0 lead while having allowed 11 Braves to reach base on hits or walks, Rogers had one out in the sixth when he walked Chipper Jones--the costliest mistake of the inning, said Piazza.

“With a 2-0 lead you have to challenge him, make him earn his way on base,” the catcher said.

Then, in a sequence that lasted six pitches, Brian Jordan hit a changeup off the right-field foul pole to tie the score, Andruw Jones ripped a fastball into left field for a single, and Perez belted the next pitch, a sinker that didn’t sink, into the left-field bleachers for a 4-2 lead, prompting Valentine to flip his lid for failing to remove Rogers at some point after the Jordan homer.

Asked if he stayed with the left-handed Rogers, who had picked two runners off base earlier in the game, to prevent Andruw Jones from stealing, Valentine said, “There were a lot of things that went through my mind, but it doesn’t matter what they were. It was the wrong decision.”

Rogers, who was 5-1 in 12 games with the Mets after his July acquisition from Oakland but pitched only 4 1/3 innings in losing Game 2 of the division series against Arizona, said he thought Valentine might remove him after Jordan’s tying home run and “since hindsight is 20-20, I sort of wish he had, but I don’t feel I pitched poorly or have any reason to be apologetic. People will probably forget that the first five innings were goose eggs. I still had enough to get by. I don’t overpower hitters to start with. I had a 2-0 lead in the sixth inning and I’ll take that any time. I mean, I’m not going to nit-pick. I thought I made good pitches to both Jordan and Perez. The one I’d like to have back was the [fastball] to Jones.”

As Rogers noted, the Braves leave little room for error. One bad pitch or decision can be fatal. Met General Manager Steve Phillips was asked if Atlanta’s dominance had worked its way into his team’s psyche.

“This game is always about how you feel and think,” he said. “It’s rarely about how you’re swinging the bat or throwing the ball. You have to give Atlanta credit. Their pitchers always seem to be ahead in the count. They nailed strike one on the outside corner all day. We have good hitters and they have good pitchers, but in every game to this point their pitchers seem to be a little better than our hitters.”

The middle of the Mets’ order--Olerud, Piazza and Ventura--is one for 21 in the series, and the left-handed swinging Olerud and Ventura had no chance again against Rocker after the Mets had closed to 4-3 in the eighth.

New York had the tying run at second when the hyper Atlanta southpaw was summoned and first struck out Olerud--who is 0 for 9 with five strikeouts against him.

Atlanta Manager Bobby Cox was then so confident of his ability to do the same to Ventura that he intentionally walked Piazza to put the go-ahead run on base, violating the managerial handbook. Rocker burned the book as he fanned Ventura for the fifth time in five confrontations with the Met third baseman.

Ventura has an injured shoulder and Piazza a sprained thumb, but neither made excuses as the wounded Mets prepared to leave Atlanta. The failure to take advantage of early opportunities against Millwood hurt more, Piazza said, than any physical ailment.

“It really eats at you,” he said of the Braves’ domination, which has now pushed the Mets to the edge of extinction, where they have been before.

Or as Ventura said: “We’ve been to hell and back over the last few weeks, and as disappointed and frustrated as everyone is right now, the one thing everyone has taken out of the last month is that it’s not over until it’s over.”

Valentine would agree.

The manager who has talked a lot about respect in recent days wasn’t taking his hat off to the Braves on Wednesday, no matter how it appeared.