TOUGH COOKIE
Pitcher, who overcame leukemia, settling in with his new team
faces competing in a different division than what he spent over a decade getting used to. Instead of being rattled by all the new changes, Carrasco is embarking on his new assignment with a quiet comfort and noticeable enthusiasm.
“I’ve been playing this game for a long time,” Carrasco said on Saturday. “The only difference is the name. It’s the same baseball.”
Carrasco arrived at Mets camp on Friday after missing a weekplus of spring training workouts. In lieu of his recovery from leukemia, his doctors wanted him to receive the COVID-19 vaccine (which he did) along with extra examinations on his heart. The added checkups ended up delaying his arrival to Port St. Lucie. The catch-up time is expected to cause Carrasco to miss one start in exhibition games this spring, but he said he will be on time and fully prepared to make his turn in the rotation come Opening Day.
“I’m so happy to be here with my teammates, and even with Lindor too,” Carrasco said. “Just getting around to everyone. Everyone has kind of been special for me and has welcomed me to the team. It was really nice.”
Carrasco, who has a 3.77 career ERA and 1.196 WHIP, will play a major role in the rotation as Steve Cohen’s Mets compete in a cutthroat NL East. Carrasco figures to be their No. 2 starter -- behind Jacob deGrom – with Marcus Stroman and Taijuan Walker following. David Peterson and Joey Lucchesi are competing for a spot in the back end of the rotation until Noah Syndergaard is expected to return from his Tommy John rehab in June.
Though it may seem like a lot of pressure for someone who is less than two years removed from a cancer diagnosis, Carrasco is unfazed. He learned a lot from his 2019 season with the Indians, when he first learned he had leukemia after days of depleted energy. Carrasco now emphasizes taking care of his body first and foremost, which was part of the reason he wanted to get the COVID-19 vaccine before coming to Mets camp.
“What I went through a couple years ago, I learned from that,” Carrasco said. “Whatever is coming right now for me, I just take it normal. I’ve been through a lot of stuff, a lot of things, so whatever is coming right now I just take it easy. But I learned a lot in 2019 when I found out I had leukemia. I think that has made me stronger now.”
Carrasco bounced back from his emotional 2019 season to pitch in 2020 s pandemic-shortened schedule. He went 3-4 and posted a 2.91 ERA over 12 starts and 68 innings. He’s been in remission for over a year and said he didn’t feel any of his previous cancer effects in the 60-game season. Now, in 2021, he’s ready to handle 180-200 innings like he’s been used to in his career.
The righty is excited to what lies ahead for the hyped-up roster and overall blend of veteran and youth talent on the Mets.
“Really good position,” Carrasco said of the Amazin’s 2021 outlook. “Really good. Pretty much everyone in camp, they’re really good. Some pitchers, position players, the way I’ve been seeing how they play, how they do everything. They’re getting ready for the season, they can’t wait until the season starts. I can’t wait either.”
Here is who Tiger Woods was when he was young, before his fall He was Babe Ruth when The Babe out-slugged the rest of baseball. Tiger dunked on everybody the way Wilt Chamberlain did. He did it all looking the way Jackie Robinson once had in a white man’s sport, the way Venus and Serena would later do the same thing in women’s tennis. And, for a time, being king of the world. We all know what happened to him later, the mess he made of his life. This is about what he was before that.
There are so many reasons why the country came to a stop on Tuesday morning when we all found out that Woods had been involved in a serious one-car accident in southern California, not much more than a year since Kobe Bryant and his daughter and seven other people had died in a tragic helicopter accident in that part of America. There was the fact that this had happened less than two years after the greatest single moment of Woods’ career, winning another Masters in April of 2019 at the age of 43, after a mostly star-crossed decade since his last major championship; after he’d made it all the way back from injury and scandal and surgery to once again be the biggest star in sports, and not just here.
There was all that, and more, while we waited to find out just how bad this accident really was for him. But it started with the fact that this was one of the true and lasting giants of sports, the rare athlete who had literally come along and changed everything, in a sport that had historically been as white as Major League Baseball had been before Robinson broke the color line one April day in 1947.
He wasn’t Ali, who really had been king of the world once. He wasn’t Jackie Robinson, who became one of the most important civil rights figures his country had ever produced. Woods changed his sport in a way no man before him ever had, all the way back to Bobby Jones. He changed the way it looked, and he made it more popular than it had ever been. He made golf seem full of possibilities, even if there has not been one African American-born golf champion to win a major championship since Woods won his first major in 1997.
Not everyone loved him, especially in his prime. But everybody watched him, in greater numbers than golf had ever seen.
At one point he held all four major titles, what became known as the Tiger Slam. He won that first Masters by 12 shots and later won a British Open at St. Andrews by eight shots. And there was the granddaddy of them all, when he won a U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by an unfathomable 15 shots in 2000. All this means is that on three of the most storied golf courses on the planet, one of them, St. Andrews, known as the home of golf, Tiger Woods won three of his 15 major titles by a total of 35 shots.
Jack Nicklaus won more majors in the end. But Tiger won more tournaments than Jack did, more than anybody else in history other than Sam Snead. And, truly, no one dominated golf more than he did in is first decade on the tour. For years, he was like watching Wilt Chamberlain average 50 points per game for a season. He truly was head and shoulders above his sport the way Ruth had been, when he finally retired with 714 home runs and no one else was within hundreds of that total.
Michael Jordan was tremendous, of course. But he came after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had been the ones to change everything in the NBA. And as great as Michael was, his prime was followed by Kobe’s prime and then LeBron’s.
When it comes to major championships, the biggest winners since Tiger’s Masters of ’97 have been Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka ,J ordan Spieth. Combined, the four of them have 16 major titles. Tiger has 15.
“In the history of golf,” McIlroy said once, “no one has ever played golf better than Tiger Woods.”
He has 15 majors and went nearly 11 years, after he won the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in 2008 with a broken bone in his leg, without winning any. You know what happened after that. His marriage exploded one Thanksgiving night, there was another time, just at the bottom of his own driveway, when he lost control of the SUV he was driving. Then came the relentless waves