If this happened to the Mets, it’s possible Twitter and Facebook and the Internet at large might’ve resembled the final few minutes of “Sharknado” the other night, blood and gore and high winds and Steve Sanders all colliding in a surreal mix of anger and laughter, with Matt Harvey ultimately swallowed whole by Jaws.
If it had happened to a few of the other teams in town, you’d have heard the usual mumbles and grumbles:
“Same old Jets.”
“Typical Knicks.”
“Ya – korol vsyego, chtoyavioo”
(Actually, that’s Russian for “I am king of all I see,” but you can understand how there’s nothing that’s going to knock the good mood out of any Brooklyn fan you know from Mikhail Prohkorov on down for the foreseeable future.)
But the Yankees?
Even in a season when everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong, when every day has been littered with banana peels, when the disabled list can sometimes be mistaken for a rough draft of the American League All-Star team … well, even in a year like that, this seems a little surreal.
Seems a little beyond surreal, truth be told.
And yet there it was, clear and obvious on the pictures the MRI relayed to the Yankees’ medical staff yesterday: a Grade 1 strain of Derek Jeter’s right quad muscle. For the normal guy who dings his quad in a noontime game of basketball at the Y, the average recovery is two to three weeks.
For Jeter?
The Yankees are crossing their fingers that taking this series off against the Twins — which started with a 2-0 win last night — and then getting most of next week off thanks to the All-Star break, will be enough time for the pain to dissolve from the quad, for it to heal properly. But even as general manager Brian Cashman revealed that hopeful best-case option, he was quick to offer a realistic alternative, too.
“We can’t rule out having to buy more time after the All-Star Game,” Cashman said, which is a nice way of avoiding having to utter the words “disabled list” when you’re already patently sick of them.
PHOTOS: JETER RETURNS TO YANKEES LINEUP
The shocking part isn’t that Jeter’s season, all of four at-bats old, is once again on pause; he is 39 years old, after all. Thirty-nine-year-olds who try to play sports at a world-class level are often warned by their bodies, “No, you don’t” and, just as often, ignore the alerts, and of course that is a part of Jeter’s legend and his legacy.
He’s more of a grinder than his pedigree predicts, constantly playing through pain, only succumbing when he breaks an ankle in extra innings of a playoff game, for instance, and can no longer stand upright.
No, the stunning part is the Yankees have grown over-the-top conservative when it comes to their players recuperating from injuries. As even Jeter himself joked on Thursday, before he realized his quad was screaming and not laughing: “They MRI everything around here now.”
They kept Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson away from the big club longer than the players expected, all in the name of good sense and good recuperation … and they re-injured themselves anyway because baseball can be cruel that way, the daily physical tolls always throwing roadblocks in the way.
They have been verrrrrrry patient with Alex Rodriguez for any number of possible reasons, though the best one probably rests in the fact he still looks like he’s running the basepaths underwater, not a terribly surprising development given he has had surgery on both hips.
And they were patient with Jeter, too, even as Jeter started hinting he was ready to come back (for which the response was a lot friendlier — and more G-rated — than when A-Rod had essentially shared the same sentiments). Some will want to shout organizational malpractice since it seems Yankees brass brought him up a day earlier than planned thanks to Travis Hafner and Brett Gardner suffering injuries Wednesday that weren’t severe enough to disable them.
But even that’s foolish. It was one day. And it was really a half-day, Jeter serving as the DH. Honestly? You can rehab for weeks on end in the bushes, and you’ll never open the engines the way you will once you’re back with the varsity. Eventually, the final test is this: Can I play in the majors without hurting myself?
In this case the answer was simple: No.
Not yet, anyway.