PHILADELPHIA — Rain would’ve been nice. Maybe a few hailstones. An unseasonable blizzard? A wintry mix? Sleet? That would’ve worked. Locusts. Pestilence. How about an apple a day? Would that have kept Roy Halladay away?
Instead there were sunny skies over Philadelphia, and there was another sell-out crowd inside Citizens Bank Park, and if the Mets had gotten the Phillies’ attention with their opening 7-2 win in this series, the Phillies had answered in kind. They stomped Mike Pelfrey and Jon Niese on back-to-back days, outscoring the Mets 21-7 in back-to-back games.
The Phillie Phanatic even went old-school yesterday, smashing a Mets batting helmet to smithereens with a block hammer. Hadn’t done that in a while. Maybe it’s a sign that the Mets are worthy opponents again.
Or will be, anyway.
“We have to look at this a certain way,” Mets manager Terry Collins said when the Phillies’ 11-0 shellacking of the Mets was complete yesterday. “You have to look at it that we spent the first week of the season away from home and we went 3-3, and now we get to go somewhere where the people will be cheering for us for a change.”
If that sounds furiously familiar, another Pollyanna manager peering through rose-tinted lenses, don’t worry: Terry Collins is not Jerry Manuel, something that was evident within days of his taking over the team and within minutes of his first spring-training workout. Asked before the game if he was more impressed by the 7-0 deficit the Mets erased Wednesday night or more aggrieved they wound up losing the game anyway, Collins was quick to prove he gets it in a way Manuel never did, or could.
“You like the fight to come back,” Collins said. “But the final score is the final score.”
Now, if you are a Mets fan who will make a careful pilgrimage to Citi Field this afternoon for the start of the home half of the schedule, you might have liked the Mets to honor their manager’s defiant stance and take advantage of plentiful early opportunities against Halladay. You might have liked to see something other than the bashing the Phillies laid on them after the Mets declined to draw first blood.
And you may be a smidge less giddy than you were two days ago.
But there is still good reason to bring not only yourself but your pie-eyed optimism to Citi Field today, because it is still April, it is still early, and, yes, let’s be very honest with each other right now — if someone had offered you a 3-3 record a week ago this morning heading into the home opener, this is what you would have said:
“Where do I sign up?”
“It would’ve been nice to get another win before we head back home,” said David Wright, who struck out with the bases loaded and one out in a scoreless game in the third inning yesterday, the key that helped unlock the floodgates for the Phillies. “But we played really well in Florida last week. We came out here with a quick start on Tuesday night. We’re doing some good things here and we’re ready to show that to the folks back in New York.”
That’s the key, of course. Despite all the jokes, despite all the slings and arrows they’ve endured all winter, for an absurd variety of reasons, Mets fans really do want to believe. They want to embrace. Look, nobody likes hating their team; nobody relishes bad news and bad baseball and bad jokes. And when the Mets won three of their first four, you started seeing Mets caps sprouting up around town again. You heard Mets fans clearing their throats.
The last two days were speed bumps, no question.
“But we have a team people are going to like,” Collins insisted. “We have a team people are going to want to see.”
From this manager, that doesn’t come off as cheap salesman talk. You want to believe? He wants you to believe. But believing is one thing. Seeing is another. Starting today, you get to make your own judgments about this team with your own eyes. For better. For worse. And for everything else in between.