SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
Times are Amazin’ for Wilmer Flores, who is fast becoming the consummate Met
LOS ANGELES — You heard all about the things Wilmer Flores was not early in the season, even when he was hitting home runs for the Mets at a surprising clip. He was not a good enough fielder. He was not a real shortstop and maybe not even a real second baseman. But what he turns out to be is a Met, and as much the face of what is happening with them right now as deGrom or the Dark Knight or Noah Syndergaard.
There were so many players, in all the years since the Mets were in first place at this time of year, who wanted to go play baseball somewhere else, first chance they got. Flores, though, wanted to be here. The Mets were all he had ever known and he wanted to be here, and that is why one of the most enduring snapshots of this baseball season was Flores, in tears, on the field a week-and-a-half ago, when he’d thought he had been traded.
But then a lot has happened since that night, hasn’t it? An awful lot.
Flores was supposed to be going to the Brewers along with Zack Wheeler for Carlos Gomez, who had been another promising Mets kid once, before he got traded away for Johan Santana. But clearly something about Gomez’s medicals scared off the Mets, and the trade was called off, and Flores stayed. The Mets got banged around for not following through on something already reported as a done deal, as if the reporting was somehow their fault. But the bottom line was that there was no deal with the Brewers. And Flores stayed.
And in staying he’s become one of the great stories of the baseball summer in New York. Suddenly it seemed as if his teammates and the fans of Citi Field rallied around him. Suddenly, there was all this noise and love for the kid every time he came to the plate. Then last Friday night he provided as good and loud and pure a moment as the Mets have had since they moved across the parking lot from old Shea. Flores knocked in the first run of what would be a weekend sweep against the Nationals, and then he hit one out in the bottom of the 12th.
Of course the weekend would just keep getting better from there. But there really had never been a better moment, at least for a Met, in that place, and that includes Santana’s nohitter, and the night when Harvey started the All-Star Game at Citi Field.
This past Friday night we were on an airplane, coming back from a family vacation, and I was able to follow the end of the MetsRays game on my laptop. When it ended I walked down the aisle to where my youngest son was sitting.
“Conforto knocked in the tying run in the ninth,” I said. “Guess who knocked in the go-ahead?” There was no hesitation. “Wilmer,” he said. Yeah, it was Wilmer again, with a single to right off the Rays closer that put the Mets ahead 4-3, which is the way it ended. The midsummer legend of Wilmer Flores, who got the Mets side of baseball New York caring for him this way because he cared so much, got a little bigger and the Mets’ winning streak went to seven games, and it was certain another weekend would end with them in first place in the National League East. And maybe the Mets, who have had such bad luck, for such a long time, on the field and off, have gotten lucky again, because of a trade they didn’t make, in this summer when Sandy Alderson decided not to rent or buy a summer place in Panic City, and played his game his way, even if he didn’t do things as fast as we wanted him to. He does not make the Gomez trade. He does not have to get rid of Flores and Zack Wheeler, and ends up getting a better and bigger bat in Yoenis Cespedes.
You never know if this is going to last, even with the kind of starting pitching Alderson has. As the Mets get healthy the Nationals are starting to get healthy, too, and so we will see how all of this lines up the rest of the way. But all season long the Mets managed to get up after getting knocked down. Before the trade deadline they survived that stretch when it seemed that the Red Bulls scored more often than they did.
Then here came Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson and Tyler Clippard and Cespedes. Michael Conforto came out of Double-A to provide some big swings and some life to the batting
order. Finally came that hideous loss in the rain to the Padres, and the Mets had fallen three behind the Nationals. Look where they are now.
Sometimes big stories in sports change in the smallest moments. Maybe something changed with the Mets a little over a week ago when the kid who wasn’t supposed to still be here got those two knocks against the Nationals in what was, for now, the biggest series ever played at Citi Field, even though there are bigger ones to come, including one with the Yankees on Sept. 18 and 19 and 20.
All season long, you know the big names in baseball New York, on both sides of town: deGrom and the Dark Knight and Noah Syndergaard. Rodriguez and Teixeira. Betances and Miller. But now Wilmer Flores, who so badly wanted to stay, has become a player we want to watch, every time he comes to the plate, even when he is batting ninth, the way Terry Collins batted him ninth in St. Petersburg on Friday night.
One of the oldest and best clichés in the world is the one about how sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make. Only now it happens in front of our eyes with the Mets. There is no better story in baseball right now, not anywhere, than the Mets making a move like this. And there is no better story on the Mets than Wilmer Flores.
“There is nothing different,” Flores said to reporters on Friday night. “I’m the same guy out there playing baseball.”
He nearly hit another home run against the Rays, Grady Sizemore robbing him in left field in the sixth inning. Then he won the game in the ninth. The young guy who cried because he didn’t want to leave now throws Friday night magic into the Mets season the way all those young guys in the starting rotation do. In so many ways, he is a perfect face of the Mets right now. Nobody saw them coming. Nobody saw him coming. Sometimes sports is so crazy, and so surprising, you almost want to laugh.