WRIGHTEOUS!
It’s hit and bliss for David in long-awaited pennant race
WASHINGTON — The toe beat the tag, and David Wright’s sixth sense told him that as he was emerging from his pop-up slide, his arms already flung wide. When Paul Nauert, the home-plate umpire, mimicked him with his own safe call, the off icial one, Wright could contain himself no longer.
Back on his feet, Wright pumped his fist so vehemently he looked like Rob Gronkowski in the end zone, celebrating a successful post pattern. The smile on his face was as long as the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. In one moment, four months of frustration — no, make that seven years of aggravation — evaporated like a sum- mer rain puddle.
“This,” he said, “is kind of what you dream about.”
Wright’s line-drive single a few minutes earlier had given the Mets a one-run lead over the Nationals in the seventh inning of this showdown series opener, and his run extended the cushion to 8-5, which is how the game would end nine Nats outs later. They were important moments in the immediate context of this fasci- nating Mets season, for sure.
But in the larger picture of the jagged journey, the Mets’ captain and longest-tenured player has endured, they felt so much bigger than that. Wright was still a kid in 2006 and ’ 07 and ’08, when the Mets won a lot of baseball games, lost a few franchise-altering gutbusters, seemed to have a boundless future of success awaiting them.
“You don’t really appreciate that until you’ve gone through the last couple of years that we’ve gone through,” Wright said, and if that’s so then he had an awful lot of time to serve his penance, to ponder his sins, to wonder if he’d made the right decision to be a Met for Life at a time when that has seemed far less an honor and more a stint in witness protection.
If you identify Sept. 28, 2008 — when the Mets lost to the Marlins 4-2 in the last game ever played at Shea Stadium — as the last time the Mets ever played a truly meaningful baseball game before Monday, one replete with postseason implications, then 2, 535 days had passed, some of it in a blur, most in the quiet desolation of one empty September after another.
“Maybe I took it for granted,” he said. “This year, this team, I’m not taking for granted. I’m going to enjoy it.”
He’d had his starburst moment two weeks earlier in Philadelphia, homering on the f irst swing he took after a 4 1/2- month absence with a bum hamstring that turned into a bad back that turned into whispers that maybe we’d seen the last of Wright as a consistent, contributing everyday presence in the Mets lineup.
He’s had some tough days at the off ice since. Friday night in Miami he left half the ballpark stranded on the basepaths, when j ust one hi t might have carried the day. That blast in Philly had been the only RBI since his return until his liner just eluded the grasp of Yunel Excobar in the seventh, scoring Ruben Tejada (with an assist from Escobar, who botched the relay).
It looked like he might bloody first-base coach Tom Goodwin’s hand when he retreated to the bag after that one, but that was
mere prelude to his 270-foot dash home when Yoenis Cespedes split the gap in right-center, when Wright spiked the air, Gronk style. That was one happy fella. “Sometimes you just gotta let it out,” said Terry Collins, whose own postgame smile rivaled his captain’s. “Good for David.”
Good for Wright, better for the Mets if this signifies the kind of hot streak Wright used to enjoy back in the day when the weather turned colder and the games more critical.
During the dueling darknesses of the 2007-08 collapses, the bookend blowups, Wright was an oasis of reliability when all around him veterans with deep résumés were looking like live- action Shrinky Dinks and hiding in the trainer’s room. In ’07 he hit .352/.432/.602 with six homers and 20 RBIs in September; in ’08 it was .340/.416/.577 with six homers and 21 RBIs.
He wasn’t the captain yet, just a kid, 24 years old, 25, but the cameras sought him out every day and every night, and the burdens of failure were his to carry then, oftentimes all alone. And even THAT was paradise compared to what followed for six endless years, and endless campaigns of futility.
He has another chance now, and he’s going to enjoy this for as long as the ride lasts, for the whole world to see. Good for David.