Out of spotlight with Mets, Wright still worth seeing

David Wright (Paul J. Bereswill)

You Can actually forget about him sometimes. That’s the pity of David Wright’s time with the Mets. That’s the pity of all these lost seasons piled up like cordwood, one on top of the other, stretched to the sky and beyond.

You can actually forget how in that last blue-sky Mets summer, 2006, Wright was poised to become the next dominant baseball hero in this city. You can forget how in 2007, when the rest of the team leaked oil those awful final weeks, when so many players seemed terrified to even walk onto the field, Wright was the one who tried to drag them to October all by himself.

“Big players always make big plays,” Mets manager Terry Collins said last night. “And that’s what he is.”

But big players need big games, crave them, and there have been too few of those for the Mets, and for Wright, since the start of the 2009 season, too many endless, empty stretches of meaningless games, forgotten and forgettable teams filling too many endless, empty summers.

So these are the games, at this stage in his career, when he can remind you — and maybe remind himself — of all he has been, of all that could have been, of all that could be if ever the Mets can replicate a major-league roster while he’s still in his prime. These have to do, these Subway Series games against the Yankees, even now, as tickets go unsold, as 8,000 empty seats bore witness to the Mets’ 2-1 victory over the Yankees.

Even as Wright himself concedes of the Subway Series: “You can’t treat this as if it’s more than it is. It’s fun. But in the grand scheme of things …”

The Mets aren’t about grand schemes, not now, not yet. They try to take little steps, baby bites, try to earn credibility back a few inches at a time. It can be a thankless task, yet Wright signed up for eight more years of it. Even as some of the team’s most ardent fans find hanging in with them so difficult, Wright asked for more. He came back.

So last night, he was in the middle of all of it, of course, hitting the home run that tied the game leading off the seventh — “He’s a superstar,” Yankees’ skipper Joe Girardi said, “and he put a superstar at-bat on [us]” — making a brilliant play to start an inning-ending around-the-horn double play in the eighth, adding a triple for kicks in the first, getting drilled on the elbow while the Mets rallied to take the lead later on.

So many nights like this across David Wright’s career as a Met, nights when he was the sole reason to plunk good money down to watch them, nights when he was the only thing keeping even the fiercest true believers from switching the TV to a CSI repeat.

“That’s why he’s the captain,” said Collins, the manager who has admired his third baseman from the first time they shook hands, who even in the throes of a losing streak lights up like a bank of stadium lights when he talks about him. “It’s amazing how many times guys like that come through for you when you absolutely need them to.”

Forget the record. Forget the standings, forget the apathy that filled the park yesterday, so many fans on both sides of the abyss opting for a beach or a barbecue over a ball yard. When Collins says the Mets needed this game, he’s right: They needed to back up Sunday’s feel-good win against the Braves with another, they needed to stand up to this stand-down version of the Yankees.

Needed to prove their hearts were still beating after Brett Gardner tried to crush them by reaching over the fence and Endychavezing a Daniel Murphy blast in the sixth.

“That took the air out of us for a little bit,” Wright admitted.

Until the captain restored it. We forget that even as a kid, Wright seemed destined to collect big moments like baseball cards, except he stopped getting the chance. The Subway Series isn’t the World Series. It isn’t even an important September series. It is a start. For David Wright?

It’ll have to settle as a proper surrogate. For now.