MIAMI — There comes a moment when you really have to hope that sanity prevails, that reason rules over rabble-rousing, that pondering is preferable to piling on.
This is as good a moment as any for that.
The Mets are easy targets, maybe the easiest magnets for abuse that’s ever existed in professional sports. We tend to look at what’s befallen them too often through the eyes of the tortured folk who live and die with them. Those who no doubt died a little bit when Francisco Rodriguez blew a 3-2 lead in the ninth last night in Florida, then were re-born ever so slightly when the Mets scored three in the top of the 10th for a 6-4 win.
Let’s go another way for a second. Let’s look at everything that’s happened since Duaner Sanchez decided to get a bite to eat on the eve of the trading deadline through the sinister soul of those who wish the Mets ill:
* Sanchez, the most critical component in the sport’s best bullpen, goes out for a late bite to eat, gets in an accident, is sidelined for the year, and the Mets have to make a panic move, shipping Xavier Nady for Roberto Hernandez and (drum roll) Oliver Perez.
* The Mets lose the ’06 NLCS to the Cardinals, and while the lasting image of that one is Carlos Beltran freezing at Adam Wainwright’s forever curveball, the series really changes when Shawn Green fails to catch Scott Spiezio’s tying Game 2 triple … a ball the sure-gloved Nady almost certainly would have gotten to.
* The Mets blow a 7½-game lead with 17 games to play in 2007.
* They blow a smaller, but still significant lead, with 17 games to play in ’08.
* They blow up thanks to injuries and dysfunction in 2009.
* They hold the wild-card lead at the All-Star break in 2010, then leap into an immediate and immense free-fall.
* The most notorious fraud in American history, Bernie Madoff, just so happens to be an old Wilpon family friend.
* Seriously, who would make this up? And if you are a Mets hater, what exactly did you do to receive such a munificent supply of material?
It’s gotten comically out of hand, though. Forget the panic that seized certain pockets of Metsdom Friday night when the Mets were shut down by Josh Johnson (not the first team Johnson’s done that to, not the last), and forget the fact that only with the Mets can Stewie Griffin’s “Family Guy” Mets rant somehow make it onto the home network; Yesterday, Mets fans had to swallow an entirely different and unexpected kind of indignity when Yankees general manager Brian Cashman opined that Pedro Feliciano — the lefty specialist who performed yeomen service for the Mets since 2006, who Cashman signed in the offseason — was “abused” by the Mets.
“He was abused,” Cashman said. “It’s a thin market when you’re looking for lefties, and he’s one of the better ones out there. But you don’t typically go after a guy who’s been used like that.”
But you know what?
Cashman did go after a guy like that. Went after him, and signed him on for two years and $8 million guaranteed. And now that Feliciano has turned up with a bum arm that’s left him starting the season on the disabled list . . . somehow that’s the Mets fault? They forced Cashman to give him the money? Does Cashman not have SNY at home? Is he incapable of reading statistics, seeing that Feliciano pitched in 90 games last year? Did he not used to employ Joe Torre, for crying out loud, who was the John Wayne Gacy of abusive managers when it came to relief pitchers?
Has Cashman ever heard of Scott Proctor? Paul Quantrill? Tanyon Sturtze?
Would Cashman have gone after any other team like that? Or does he feel empowered because he knows the Mets are the Mets, knows that they’re in a sad-sack chapter of their existence, and figures, what the hell? Maybe the Mets can be blamed for Kei Igawa, too.
Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen, speaking as a loyal company man, when told of Cashman’s remarks, quipped, “They didn’t know that when they signed him?” Then he added, more seriously, “I feel badly that someone feels that way, but that was part of the reason we decided not to re-sign him.”
Warthen better be careful, or else he somehow will get the Mets blamed on Sbarro’s declaring bankruptcy.