Carlos Beltran watched a curve from Adam Wainwright ends the Mets' season in 2006.  SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a rainy day in late October and the home team, fresh from defeating the St. Louis Cardinals and their ace, Chris Carpenter, in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, is one victory from a World Series berth opposite the Detroit Tigers.  Is it live, or a traumatized Mets fan’s flashback?  The similarities are striking between the Giants’ Game 7 against the Cardinals on Monday night at AT&T Park and the series decider that the Mets and Cardinals played at Shea Stadium in 2006. And, of course, there’s the one notable difference: the decorated outfielder Carlos Beltran was striving to beat the Cardinals then, but his aim now is to lead them.  Six years ago, Beltran came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and two out and the Mets trailing the Cardinals by two runs. Martha Stewart could not have set the table more beautifully for the Mets.  Beltran’s success in the 2004 postseason against the Cardinals as a Houston Astro, when he batted .417 with 4 home runs and 12 runs scored in seven games in a losing cause, had precipitated his off-season signing by New York to a blockbuster seven-year deal that paid him over $115 million. In the 2006 regular season he hit 41 homers and drove in 116 runs, both career highs.  The Cardinals starter in that fateful Game 7 was Jeff Suppan, a control artist from the same mold as Kyle Lohse, the St. Louis pitcher pegged to start Monday. Beltran doubled off Suppan in his first at-bat. He drew a walk in the bottom of the eighth, after which Suppan was replaced by Randy Flores, who was succeeded in the ninth by Adam Wainwright.  After Jose Valentin and Endy Chavez singled, Cliff Floyd struck out, Jose Reyes lined out to center and Paul Lo Duca walked, loading the bases. That brought up Beltan, who took a changeup for a strike on the first pitch. Wainwright’s second pitch was a curve that Beltran swung at and missed. His third offering was a curve on the outside of the plate that froze Beltran. He struck out looking, ushering in the Mets’ nuclear winter.  The Mets have not been back to the postseason, and before this season neither had Beltran, who joined the Cardinals after finishing the 2011 season with the Giants, who acquired him from the Mets near the trading deadline for Zack Wheeler, a pitching prospect, and cash.  Before the season, Beltran told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he watched the replay of his at-bat against Wainwright the day after the series clincher and then never again. He needed to see it only once, he said, to recognize that there was nothing he could have done differently.  “I couldn’t react to it,” Beltran told the newspaper, referring to Wainwright’s third strike. “He got me.” Beltran added: “I couldn’t pull the trigger. It happened many times before in my career. It just happened in a playoff situation.”  On Sunday night, after the Cardinals’ 6-1 loss to the Giants in Game 6, Beltran talked about turning the page and returning to AT&T Park Monday ready to write a new chapter. He was asked how much it would mean to him to have a big Game 7 Monday to erase the memory of that final at-bat in 2006.  “I don’t need to erase anything,” Beltran said. “I just have to come here tomorrow and play the game and hopefully we can win.”  In 2006, Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina succeeded where Beltran failed. Molina, who batted .216 with 6 home runs during the regular season, broke a 1-1 tie in the top of the ninth with a two-run homer off Aaron Heilman.  He smiled Sunday when reminded that he was widely referred to then as a “light-hitting” catcher. Six years on, the description seems laughable; Molina batted .315 during the regular season, his emergence as one of the game’s elite players foreshadowed by his playoff performance against the Mets.  “I don’t remember anything about myself from that game,” Molina said. “It was the team that came through.” He added, “Hopefully we’ll get the same result Monday.”  Lance Berkman, the Cardinals’ injured first baseman, who also played with Beltran in Houston, stood for several minutes Sunday night in the visiting clubhouse trying to deconstruct the art of clutch hitting and pitching.  “Clutch performers,” he concluded, “are simply guys who play normal in big spots.”  Which comes first, the gamer or the big game? Beltran has waited six years for another crack at that question. Long-suffering Mets fans will be inordinately interested in his reply.
In 2006 Carlos Beltran, now the Cardinalsâ slugging right fielder, froze on a called third strike to end the Metsâ season in Game 7 of the N.L.C.S.