WE can debate the merits of the men and their missions at another time. We can analyze whether the old veteran pitching tonight on the left coast has anything left, or if the kid with kerosene in his right arm wouldn’t be better utilized in another role. There will be plenty of time to have those conversations.
For now, we need only focus on this: Pete and Heat.
For now, there is Pedro Martinez returning to the Mets in San Francisco, throwing his first big-league pitch in two months and two days about 3½ hours or so after Joba Chamberlain will throw his first big-league pitch as a starter, ever. There is a buzz of history surrounding the Chamberlain start, a whisper of nostalgia wafting over Martinez’s.
And in New York City, which has been a restless, simmering crockpot across most of the first two months of the baseball season, there is the sense that we have been blessed with a second Opening Day, 64 days after Pedro’s last start in Miami, 64 days after the Yankees’ real opener, which also came with the Blue Jays at the Stadium.
Two pitchers, two teams, two stadiums, two larger-than-life personalities who need only one name apiece – Pedro & Joba, Pete & Heat – to project who they are and how much they mean to the fortunes of the local nines.
“I think we’re due to do something great here, and I hope we do it soon,” Pedro said the other day at Shea where, as always, he was a pied piper in blue-and-orange piping, making the whole room seem happier and the whole season seem less gloomy just by showing up. “I hope all the adversity that we have to face is already gone.”
As for Joba, it has been apparent from the moment he received this assignment just how much he relishes what he’ll be walking into tonight, when every seat is sure to be filled a good 15 minutes before the lineup cards are exchanged, when bathrooms and concession stands are certain to be empty during the top half of each inning he works.
“It will help,” he said the other night, of the familiar city-wide clamor that we haven’t felt around here since Dwight Gooden was Dr. K and barely out of his teens. “And it will be comforting.”
Comfort is something that has been in such short supply this suffocating springtime at Yankee Stadium, and at Shea Stadium. These are two teams that had hoped to spend the summer riding a collision course toward one another, a six-month game of chicken with an eye toward bidding farewell to their dying ballparks in the most storybook style possible, in October, in one more Subway Series. Neither team has shown a championship pedigree yet, of course. But it is early.
And tonight we get Joba at the Stadium. We get Pedro out in AT&T Park. Between them, we might not get nine innings combined. Between them, we may not get a decision, with Chamberlain paired with the great Roy Halladay and Martinez with the ever-baffling Barry Zito. Regardless, we are bound to get something else back, the moment both men take the mound.
Finally, the baseball noise you hear will be celebratory, not ridden with angst. Finally, Yankees fans can stop worrying about the view from fourth place and begin to enjoy the ride anew, and Mets fans can stop verbally assaulting their own players and start verbally assuaging one.
Both pitchers are where they are supposed to be, finally, after separate wanderings through different wildernesses. Pedro’s were more painful, more filled with mortal thoughts and vulnerabilities. Joba’s were more protective, lodged in the innings-friendly role of a set-up man, a nice luxury on a good team, an indulgence on a team like the Yankees with too few men who can guarantee ever getting him the ball in a useful spot.
Sixty-four days after Opening Day, we get an encore. Seventeen days before the first ray of summer, we get a preview, a taste, a sampling of what it may hold in store for us. It’ll be a long night of baseball in New York. A good, long night.