SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
A BIG APPLE
It’s been a while since Mets have made this an NL town, but Cespedes is putting them over the top
THIS IS NOT just a rising of the Mets in these last weeks and month, an amazing — and amazin’ — baseball story that has been built around a dynamic player and Cuban hitter named Yoenis Cespedes, in this season that was supposed to be only and all about young pitching at Citi Field. It is more than that. It is a rising of something we had lost around here, for a long time, to the point sometimes where it felt permanent: National League New York.
That is something out of the city’s grand baseball past, out of the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field and old Shea Stadium, out of 1969 at Shea, when the Mets came on like this at the end of the season and went blowing past the Cubs the way these Mets have gone blowing past the Washington Nationals; and certainly out of the summer and fall of 1986, when the Mets were as big and hot an act as baseball has ever seen around here.
Now all of that finds its way to a new venue, across the parking lot from where Shea once stood, where 14 years ago, in the shadow of Sept. 11, Mike Piazza hit one of the most famous home runs in the city’s baseball history, on the night when baseball came back to the city.
Of course it is still about Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard and the kid from Long Island, Steven Matz. It is about Bartolo Colon, an ageless pitcher with one of those arms, pitching as well over the last month as he ever has in his life. It is about Jeurys Familia, the closer who wasn’t supposed to be a closer who has become one of the best closers in the sport this season. And an unexpectedly cool leadoff guy in Curtis Granderson.
But the star of the thing, the brightest star in New York City sports right now, is someone who wasn’t even here two months ago and wasn’t supposed to be here. That is Cespedes. And please don’t tell me that Bryce Harper should be a mortal lock to be MVP if the Nationals continue to fade and the Mets continue to run away from them in the National League East.
There are no rules for these things, because if there were, pitchers who have their own award wouldn’t win the MVP sometimes. But they do. If Cespedes, who has hit 16 home runs for the Mets since being traded here from Detroit, who has been an RBI a game, who has been the most dangerous hitter in Major League Baseball since he hit town, continues to write one of the most amazing — and amazin’ — 60-game seasons baseball has ever known, he ought to be the Most Valuable Player in the National League this season. He ought to change the rules on things like that the way he has changed this season.
This is the way Manny Ramirez hit for the Dodgers one time, when he got traded to them and nearly hit .400 after that. Ramirez finished fourth in the voting for MVP that year. So he was in the conversation. Cespedes isn’t just in the conversation these days, he dominates it, in this baseball moment when you turn your head you might miss seeing him hit one out of Turner Field the way he did on a 3-0 pitch Friday night, and nearly out of the state of Georgia.
“I don’t know if there
is a higher league, but he needs to be moved up,” Terry Collins said Friday night. “I think he is enjoying this as much as everybody else. He’s come over in a pennant race ... he’s caught up in everything that is going on. It’s catchy.”
It is a bit more than that. Cespedes really does seem to be playing in a league of his own, as the Mets play a season that has so little to do with the one they were playing earlier in the season, when the Red Bulls seemed to be scoring more often and more easily than they were. Almost two months ago exactly, there was that Sunday afternoon, 18-inning, nearly-six-hour game against the Cardinals, one the Mets somehow won despite being 1-for-26 with runners in scoring position that day and leaving 25 men on base.
You remember what it was like then: Granderson would stretch a single into a double and it would feel in the moment like an offensive explosion. Back when the Mets could have two guys hitting under .200 in the middle of their batting order.
Not long after that, though, Cespedes came to town, like a summer storm.
It wasn’t supposed to be him. It was supposed to be Carlos Gomez of the Brewers, and Zack Wheeler was supposed to be going, along with Wilmer Flores. But then the Mets doctors didn’t like something they saw in Gomez’s medical reports (even though the Astros would step right in right after that and trade for Gomez themselves). It is a moment that is already legend around Citi Field, the story of this season changing when the Mets backed away and called off the trade, and Wilmer Flores cried, and then here came Cespedes.
Piazza came here a long time ago, and it was the force of his game and his bat that changed the culture around the Mets at the time. No one could ever diminish how important he was and how much he meant. But for the quarter-of-a-season that Cespedes has played in a Mets uniform so far, understand something: He has looked like the most dynamic hitter the Mets have ever had.
Harper has been something to see for the Nationals. Maybe he can carry them to one more run before this is over, as unlikely as that seems. Mike Trout is always something to see for the Angels, though he has faded this season. It is Cespedes who has become the at-bat in baseball you cannot miss.
He came here from Cuba and was an American League guy. Oakland first, then Boston, then Detroit. Now he is here, with the Mets, at a retro ballpark, in the middle of a rising for them and for National League New York. Not the higher league Terry Collins spoke of in Atlanta. Just one we had lost, for far too long, and now have back.