First-week disaster averted, just 156 games to go
ATLANTA — We could be having a very different conversation right now. There’s a way this first road trip could have gone, say 1-5 or even 2-4, that would have turned the Mets’ home opener into a storming of the Bastille, rather than a happy sellout.
Having squandered all trust with a miserable half-decade, the Mets have a miniscule margin for good vibes. After a preseason defined by bold declarations of selfconfidence, the team needed to start its season with a successful swing through Washington and Atlanta, or face harsh talk about the players, manager, front office, owners, everyone. Terry Collins might already be facing the first wave of talk radio job speculation.
But with Sunday’s sweepavoiding win over the Braves, the Mets registered an achievement slightly better: They finished the road trip 3-3, and kicked the can of judgment down the road for a few days. Our verdict on the team after this important trip? Eh. But that’s better than Uh-oh.
And don’t think we’re overstating the significance of one week. Don’t give us the whole “calm down, dude, it’s just six games” rap, either. These were six games that the team viewed as highly important, six games that fans scrutinized, six games of a season that is finally supposed to carry meaning.
Rewind to Monday morning, and the hours before Opening Day in Washington. After four years of rebuilding, the curtain was about to rise on the first big league games of the Sandy Alderson era that mattered.
The seven days that followed came loaded with news and feelings. Before playing a single home game in 2015, this Mets team experienced wild swings between thrilling and depressing, promising and plodding.
All of these events have occurred since Monday’s first bell rang: Max Scherzer threatened to throw the second Opening Day no-hitter in baseball history, until the Mets came back to win. Closer Jenrry Mejia hit the disabled list with a surprise elbow injury. Matt Harvey earned not just the back page, but front pages, too, with as thrilling a return to baseball as anyone could have expected. Remember that? Feels likes ages ago already, doesn’t it?
The Mets won two of three against the heavily favored Nationals, who started Scherzer, Jordan Zimmermann and Stephen Strasburg. Then, they lost goofy on Friday in Atlanta, and exposed serious deficiencies in their middle infield defense — not a small problem for a team built around pitching.
The next afternoon, Collins had to gather his team and deliver the news that Mejia had drawn an 80-game drug suspension. Five hours later, David
Wright stood at his locker after a second straight loss, and spoke with anger.
“You’re hurting everyone in here,” the captain said of Mejia on Saturday night. “You’re letting down your teammates, and that probably means just as much if not more than hurting yourself.’’
Sunday brought brighter news, as Mejia’s close friend Jeurys Familia stepped into the ninth inning, and earned a save. Earlier in the day, Bartolo Colon had cracked everyone up with an RBI single, while he was breezing through the Braves’ lineup.
The Sunday afternoon mood in the clubhouse, as the Mets showered, tipped the clubbies, and prepared for the year’s first flight to LaGuardia, could be summarized with one word: Phew.
“Obviously, we wish we would have gone 6-0,” said Michael Cuddyer, who hit his first homer of the year. “But to get down in this series 0-2, to be able to come back in this hard-fought game and win, we consider this game a success. Salvaging that is all we can control today. So we’re happy with that and excited for the home opener tomorrow.”
On the other side of the room, Wilmer Flores was buttoning his dress shirt and speaking with relief after a solid day. Flores made two throwing errors on Friday night, and has been chasing pitches like a man desperate to justify his job. It helped that he doubled on Sunday, and returned to playing passable defense.
“If I had that in mind, I’m just going to be feeling pressure out there,” Flores said of his struggles, which have inspired angst among the fan base, or at least the segment intense enough to spend game days on Twitter. “I just try to relax. I’ve done this before.”
Surely, with so many judges out there, and a mandate to prove his worth as a big league shortstop, relaxing can’t be easy. “It’s not,” Flores said. He is not alone. No longer can the Mets operate free from the burden of daily expectations. No longer will we file their games and series under, “who cares, they stink anyway.”
Now, life is full, and stakes are high. And the team will need to do better than merely avoiding disaster.