Sting of Queens: 12-run inning for Mets

NEW YORK — From his vantage point at the top step of the Mets’ dugout, Terry Collins understood he was witnessing history. He may not have known the details — no Mets team had ever scored 12 runs in an inning, no Met had ever clubbed an extra-base hit in nine consecutive games, nor amassed six RBIs in an inning, and so on and so forth — but he recognized the implications.

The Mets’ record-setting third inning Friday did not merely send them rocketing to a 13-1 win over the Giants, one of the National League’s best teams. It also provided explicit evidence that this Mets offense is unrecognizable from the one Collins, on the same top step, watched night after night last April through July.

“This is a different team, for sure,” Collins said. “You just go through those streaks sometimes where it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t score. Tonight, we swung the bat and it seemed like everything we hit, it went into a gap somewhere.”

Six of the Mets’ eight hits in their record-setting third inning indeed settled onto patches of Citi Field grass. One glanced off right fielder Hunter Pence’s glove. Another — Yoenis Cespedes’ third career grand slam, a liner to left field that evoked his game-tying pinch-hit shot three days earlier — cleared the fence.

By the time the Mets …

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