Jose Reyes wasn’t taking any chances, not in this ballpark, not after having gone 384 days since last seeing a baseball fly off his bat and over a fence. It was the crowd that made him look up, midway between first base and second, just in time to see it plop lazily behind a blue Xerox sign.
“Then I could slow down,” Reyes said with a smile, “and that felt even better.”
The smile has been more ubiquitous the past few days, the laughter, the infectious enthusiasm, especially after a night like this one, when the Mets blanked the Phillies 5-0 and Reyes added a couple more hits, a couple more RBIs, a couple more defensive gems, and more than a few reminders of what he used to be . . . and what he still aspires to.
“I’m beginning to feel good,” Reyes said.
And he isn’t alone. This is what Mets fans remember about Reyes, how he would come to the ballpark every day the way they would if they could, channeling Ernie Banks, willing to play all day. You take a force like that away from a team for almost a year, it’s like extinguishing the sun.
“You can see what a different team we are with him,” Jerry Manuel said, “than when we have to go without.”
The most frustrating part for everyone — starting with Reyes — may have been the six weeks when Reyes was in the lineup in name, when he was on the field in body, but it was as if an imposter had come back wearing the No. 7 jersey. He looked tentative. He looked sluggish. He slapped one easy pop-up after another into the scorebook.
“I never want to make an excuse,” Reyes said. “If I’m playing, I have a responsibility to play a certain way.”
What he needed most was patience, at a time when it was in short supply around Citi Field. Manuel, needing to win games, moved him to the 3-hole in the order, then back again. Mets fans, desperate for something to cling to, wondered if they hadn’t seen the best of Reyes already. Even Reyes himself started to wonder. To his credit, he never took his woes out to the field with him.
But the Mets weren’t hoping to get Rey Ordonez back. They expected Reyes. And in the past few days, that’s precisely what they’ve gotten, and it is no coincidence that they are 5-1 in their last six, that they’ve picked up four games on the Phillies in four days, that they’ll go for a sweep today that will absolutely be noticed even by the too-cool-for-school Phillies.
“I know what him playing well has always meant to this team,” said Jason Bay. “This isn’t to put any pressure on what he has to do for us, or say something about how-he-goes, so-goes the-team . . .”
It just happens to be true. And so is this: In so many ways, Reyes can’t ever win, not with fans, not with opponents. When times are good, he claps his hands a lot, smiles a lot, laughs a lot, likes to steal bases, likes to turn doubles into triples because he can. And sometimes, when he does, he hears words like “bush,” “hot dog,” and “showboat.”
And when he tries to tone it down, pull it back, act more vanilla, more businesslike, take fewer chances, loses the thousand-watt smile and the bounce in his step? He hears other words: “Aloof.” “Detached.” “Coasting.” “Mailing it in.”
Reyes laughs when this is mentioned to him.
“I know!” he said. “I never embarrass anyone. The only reason I’ve ever become the player I’ve become is because of my enthusiasm and because I really love playing the game. I was like that when I was a child, and I am like that now because I really do love it. But that isn’t how some people see it.”
They might now. There is only one way for Reyes to play the game, and we have seen it again the past few nights after wondering if we’d seen it for the last time. There is no need to pretend like he isn’t having a hell of a good time again.