Getting into the swing
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — This was the other afternoon, when the snow was coming down sideways in New York City. At the same time it did, though, it was all baseball on the east coast of Florida, with Jacob deGrom pitching the way he did when he first became a star with the Mets, before he got hurt last season the way too many of the Mets’ young pitchers got hurt. By the time deGrom’s day was over, he had thrown four innings and given up a run, though that run was a loud one, coming on a home run from Brian McCann that you worried might bust a window over in Mar-A-Lago.
Still: deGrom pitched the way he did on this day and Yoenis Cespedes hit a shot to left that looked and sounded like McCann’s shot to right. So for this one spring training afternoon, even with only a handful of regulars scattered around The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, this was exactly what the Mets wanted the season to look like, whether David Wright makes it all the way back or not. They want the pitchers to pitch and for Cespedes to hit.
Of course the Mets need Cespedes to stay healthy and hit, because they have no chance to do anything without him; because the trade Sandy Alderson made for him was one of the great game-changing trades in Mets history and ended up putting them back in the World Series for the first time in 15 years. Alderson brought Cespedes here and then twice – after the ’15 season and after the ’16 season – Cespedes decided to stay, and now the Mets have a guy who makes things in the ballpark stop when he comes walking to the plate. There have been only a handful of guys in the team’s history who have ever done that.
“He commands attention,” Terry Collins said in West Palm on Tuesday, leaning against a railing near the Mets dugout.
But what still commands the attention of all baseball is the Mets’ starting rotation, with Noah Syndergaard at the top of it, and deGrom behind him. It keeps going from there, through Matt Harvey and Matz and Gsellman and Lugo and maybe even Zack Wheeler, who pitched in West Palm a couple of days after deGrom did, and looked swell, even if Bryce Harper hit one towards Mar-A-Lago off him.
It is deGrom, though, who has been most impressive for Collins and for his team so far in this baseball spring, coming back from surgery on his ulnar nerve. McCann’s homer, on the 3-1 pitch, was the first run he has given up this spring. He threw a total of 52 pitches against the Astros, got up to 96 and 97 on the radar gun, struck out six guys. He’s now pitched 10 innings and struck out 13 guys. “The main thing is mechanics,” deGrom said after he was done on Tuesday afternoon. “The ball is coming out better than it did last year and I feel like there’s less effort. So the big thing for me is
to try to stay smooth and repeat my delivery.”
On the other side of Florida, young guys for the Yankees have hit the way deGrom has pitched, and if you want to know why everybody in baseball New York is ready for the season to start right now (baseball is not just relief from the way things are going in the White House, it’s a relief from having to talk about Phil Jackson and the triangle offense and another lost season for the Knicks) you can start with all the young talent from Tampa to Port St. Lucie and back.
There are still question marks about Harvey, coming back from his own physical issues, and Wheeler, who is finally throwing hard after Tommy John surgery two years ago. We were all reminded last season, as if we needed reminding, about all the luck and serendipity attached to young pitching shoulders and elbows. The Mets were coming hard out of that World Series against the Royals, and by September the only guys left from Collins’ original starting rotation were Syndergaard and a 43-year-old named Bartolo Colon.
With all that, and with the other injuries to Collins’ infield, the Mets still made the playoffs, made it all the way to the 9th inning of the wild card game against the Giants. Now the Mets look loaded with pitching again. And if they start the season with all their young guys in the rotation, maybe 2017 becomes a season at Citi Field when the Mets start the way they finished the last two years. Even with the patchwork rotation Collins had by August and September, his team still managed to win 27 of its last 40 games before it ran into Madison Bumgarner, and Conor Gillaspie ran into a Jeurys Familia fastball on what became the last night of the Mets’ season.
But Mets vs. Astros the other afternoon, in front of all these Mets fans making all this Mets noise, really was a dream spring training day, with deGrom throwing hard again, and striking out six more guys. When Cespedes went deep – after just missing a fastball from Houston’s Lance McCullers his first time up – it was his fifth home run in 27 spring-training at-bats. A couple of days later it was Zack Wheeler coming down I-95 to pitch against the Nationals.
The Nationals are loaded, too, even with their own questions about the bullpen. The Nationals have Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer and some young arms behind them. You know Harper will come back big this season. And Mike Rizzo has added Adam Eaton, because Rizzo is one of the best in the business and keeps adding parts as he tries to finally put the Nationals in the World Series.
They’ve got more stick than the Mets do. The Mets have more pitching. There it was on Tuesday afternoon when deGrom had the ball in his right hand. Long way from the snowstorm hitting Citi Field. Still a ways from Opening Day. But you can see Opening Day now. You can see it clearly. DeGrom goes again on Sunday.