TOP OF THE ORDER
HE has been easy to overlook because of all the talent that has entered the room these past few weeks and months. David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud returned, to great fanfare. Yoenis Cespedes and Tyler Clippard arrived to great acclaim.
Yet it is Curtis Granderson who has been the steady, regular influence in the Mets’ lineup, at the top of the batting order. The one guy who was there in the heady peaks of April, the numbing days of early summer, and, lately, the resurgent excitement of a pennantrace September.
Quietly, Granderson is putting together a season worthy of the NL’s Comeback Player of the Year trophy, hitting .259 with 23 home runs and 61 RBIs through Friday, playing terrific defense, and giving the Mets a genuine presence in the lineup in almost every game they play.
“A very gratifying year for me so far,” Granderson said not long ago. “But not a satisfying one. Not yet. There are still things I— that we — want to accomplish.”
It’s a similar task for Granderson off the field, as well, for the project closest to his heart. Two years ago, Granderson donated $5 million of his own money to build the Curtis Granderson Stadium complex on the campus of his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago.
There are enough facilities — two indoor diamonds for small kids, a majorleaguesized stadium, two fullylit intramural fields and a softball facility — that 10,000 in nercity kids use the stadium yearround. And only partly to try to emulate Granderson, himself an innercity kid who loved basketball but used baseball to chase his dreams.
“We don’t necessarily believe we’re going to find the next great baseball players by doing this, and that’s really not what this is about anyway,” Granderson says. “There are so many other things that bringing kids into baseball can accomplish. And those are things that we’ve already seen results for.”
Chief among these is bringing kids from Chicago’s vastly divergent neighborhoods together — “Black kids playing against Latin kids, Asian kids playing against white kids,” he says — who would never otherwise encounter each other.
“At one of my camps over the AllStar break, I had a kid come up to me and say, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a white kid before,’ ” Granderson says, “and he was 9 years old. In a city that’s still as segregated as Chicago is, it gives kids a chance to broaden what they know about.”
And also another advantage.
“A lot of these kids, the first time they walk onto the fields there, it’s the first time they’ve ever stepped on a college campus,” he says. “And you see kids who talk to each other and say, ‘ Wow, this is what college looks like? This might be for me.’ Baseball can open so many doors — socially, scholastically — and that’s what we want to do. We want to open as many doors as possible, to as many kids as possible.”
Granderson’s great hope is that in the next few years he can convince MLB to create an Urban Youth Academy in Chicago, and to that end he has talked with the commissioner’s office, the Players Association, the White Sox and the Cubs. Los Angeles and Atlanta have such programs up and running already, and Granderson is hoping before long his hometown will be city No. 3. And if that happens? “Then anything is possible,” he says. “Kids will be excited about the game, they’ll want to. Pass that excitement on to friends and family, maybe get a great education because of the game. There’s so many possibilities.”