No LA stories remain

LOS ANGELES -- For Nomar Garciaparra, there will be no gimpy-legged stroll into glory, a la Kirk Gibson.

For Grady Little, there will be no Hollywood rewrite, this one with a happy ending.

For Derek Lowe, there will be no reliving the sweet memories of that championship season.

For Ned Colletti, the general manager who spent the first five years of his life living over a garage, there will be no upgrade to the penthouse.

For Frank McCourt, the owner who, with his wife, Jamie, pulled up roots in Boston when he couldn't buy the Red Sox, there will be no parades down the palm tree-lined boulevards of his adopted home.

Baseball season has gone dark in the City of Angels. The New York Mets, extending their October on the same day the Yankees extinguished theirs, completed a three-game sweep of the Dodgers with a 9-5 win before 56,293 blue Angelenos, whose hopes that their team would live to play another day disappeared in a blizzard of bloop hits against a Dodger bullpen that left a big part of its game in a Manhattan barroom.

Willie Randolph can take that fat stack of rejection slips he accumulated before the Mets hired him as manager and run them through a shredder. Without his ace, Pedro Martínez, or his postseason hole card, Orlando ``El Duque" Hernandez, Randolph managed the Mets back to the National League Championship Series for the first time since 2000.

``It's the first time where you've seen that happen where the National League team [from New York] is the one, where we're the only one playing," said Mets general manager Omar Minaya, whose transformation of the Mets began two winters ago with a double shot of superstar signings, Martinez and outfielder Carlos Beltran, continued with another two-fisted grab last winter of closer Billy Wagner and first baseman Carlos Delgado, and went into full bloom with the emergence of superstars-in-training Jose Reyes and David Wright.

``It can't get any better for our fans than today. I can tell you that right now," Minaya said. ``It's going to get even better. But I'm saying today we can talk about National League baseball all week in New York, and that's great."

Last night's win had its anxious moments for the Mets, especially when the Dodgers, after spotting the Mets a 4-0 lead against Greg Maddux in the first three innings, clawed back to take a 5-4 lead in the fifth. Jeff Kent, who had four hits last night and eight in the series, hit a two-run home run off former Sox cast-off Darren Oliver, and Pedro Feliciano walked rookie James Loney, who had smacked a two-run double in the fourth, to force in the go-ahead run.

With the bases still loaded, Little called on Garciaparra, who had torn his left quadriceps and could not run well enough to be in the starting lineup. Just a week before, in San Francisco, he'd also swung and missed at a pitch that left him in agony from the pain of a strained side muscle.

From his seat next to the Dodger dugout, Tom Lasorda, who was managing the Dodgers in 1988 when a lame Gibson hit the most famous home run in franchise history, whipped the crowd into a frenzy, thrusting both arms over his head as he led the thunderous cheers. ``I told Nomar today," Colletti said, `` `In 1988, you might have been a little kid, but in 1988, a guy who could barely run hit one into the seats and wrote his name into history.' I said, `You never know.' He was the perfect guy."

Catcher Paul Lo Duca went to the mound to talk to Feliciano; soon he was joined by Rick Peterson, the Mets' pitching coach. Garciaparra, who before the game had been named the league's Comeback Player of the Year, took a ball, then a strike, then swung at a high fastball and banged it on one hop to Feliciano. As Garciaparra took just a few strides down the line, Feliciano flipped the ball to Delgado and the inning was over.

``There was only one Kirk Gibson," Garciaparra said afterward. ``Only one moment."

Soon, the Dodgers would be finished. The Mets, once again exploiting the absence of the Dodgers' most effective lefthanded reliever, Joe Beimel, who'd cut his pitching hand in a tavern mishap, then lied about it, scored three times in the top of the sixth against rookie righthander Jonathan Broxton.

Former Dodger Shawn Green, who had three hits, lined a double into the right-field corner to open the inning. That would be the hardest-hit ball of the inning allowed by Broxton, but no matter. After walking pinch hitter Michael Tucker, Broxton gave up three consecutive flares. Jose Reyes dropped a ball into short center field for a run-scoring single that tied the score. Lo Duca and Beltran then dunked bloopers into short left field, just out of reach of Dodgers shortstop Rafael Furcal, to score two more runs.

``Amazing," Kent said. ``So many Texas Leaguers in a playoff game? I've never seen it like that. They were taking big swings and missing them, but they just kept falling in."

While the Dodgers, who had 16 hits but left 13 runners on base, left six men on base in the final four innings, the Mets expanded their lead in the eighth, which began with a double by pinch hitter Chris Woodward and was followed by yet another blooper by Lo Duca, who flipped his bat almost apologetically as the ball fell into right field for another single. Dodger sloppiness produced another run, a balk by Brett Tomko and a throwing error by third baseman Wilson Betemit accounting for the final run of the night.

The score entering the bottom of the ninth was 9-5, just as it was when the Dodgers miraculously hit four consecutive home runs to tie a game against the Padres that Garciaparra won in the 10th with another home run. But the Dodgers had a better chance of winning Powerball than duplicating that show of power. Wagner struck out the first two batters he faced, gave up a two-out single to Loney, then induced pinch hitter Ramon Martinez to pop to second to end the game.

Watching from the Dodger dugout was Little, whose last visit to October had ended in shell-shocked fashion, three years ago against the Yankees. This time, the stunner may have come in the second inning of the first game, when two Dodger base runners were erased at the plate on the same hit. Little, who knows something about the topic, said that night it was the kind of play that could haunt a team.

Lowe, who had won the clinching game in all three playoff series when the Sox won the World Series in 2004, lost that game, and the Dodgers went quietly thereafter.

The loss of Beimel, who showed up before the game yesterday and apologized to his teammates, probably hurt more.

``It certainly didn't help," Colletti said. ``But I can't turn back the hands of time. And neither can Joe Beimel."

These are New York minutes now. And they all belong to the Mets.