MIAMI – The difference can be as simple as a word choice, as basic as an action verb. You’ve seen Johan Santana plenty of times: on television, at Yankee Stadium, maybe last summer when he walked into Shea and made the Mets look like a losers-bracket entry at Williamsport.
You could admire him in those rare glimpses, or appreciate him, or even fear him. Then he would be gone, off to the other league, off to flummox someone else’s hitters. You could read about him in the newspapers. You could watch him accept his Cy Young Award.
“But this,” Mets GM Omar Minaya said yesterday, a few moments after the Mets had put the finishing touches on this 7-2 Opening Day victory over the Marlins, “is something else. This is something a whole lot better.”
Now, if you care at all about the Mets, the verbs that arrive in a rush are something else entirely. Excite. Thrill. Electrify. Exhilarate. Yesterday, for the first time, he was wearing the orange-and-gray vestments in a real game, and for the first time you could let your imagination run free, if you wanted.
Even if you don’t need to. Because the reality is every bit as exciting, as thrilling, as electrifying, as exhilarating, as the rumor. The hype equals the hyperbole.
Santana didn’t throw a perfect game yesterday (though he flirted with one for a while). He didn’t even throw a shutout, Josh Willingham seeing to that by drilling one of Santana’s few mistakes over the fence for a two-run homer in the fourth. And no one will ever confuse these Marlins with a legitimate major league team, not as long as their $21 million payroll is dwarfed by the annual haul that Santana will average by himself over the next seven years.
All of that is duly noted. And still . . .”He is as good as advertised,” David Wright said. “Better.”
“A pleasure to watch,” Willie Randolph said.
“A joy to catch,” Brian Schneider said.
Everyone wants to do well on Opening Day. But these Mets, this year, needed Opening Day. They needed to play a game again, after six long months of dwelling on how 2007 ended.
There was a lot to like. Old faces had big games: Jose Reyes (two singles), Carlos Beltran (two doubles), Wright (three RBIs). New faces had encouraging introductions: Angel Pagan and Ryan Church (RBI singles), Schneider (a fan-endearing hustle play, keeping a wild throw out of the dugout with a Henrik Lundquist-style butterfly move). Even against a Quadruple-A team, it was a favorable start.
But Santana was the focus, the spotlight, a one man Bat Signal for the Mets and for the sizable pile of Mets fans who comprised the Dolphin Stadium crowd of 38,308. There were 100 pitches and 68 strikes, eight strikeouts and only three hits. You would assume there will be more dominant performances than this one across the next 34 starts. For starters, this would do fine.
“Finally,” Santana said with a smile. “I was just trying to be myself out there, hit corners, mix my pitches. It’s always good to get the first one out of the way. It’s a relief.”
For him. For all of them. At last, the Mets can finally be all about 2008 now, they can be liberated from 2007 and delivered to what they’ve craved all winter long, the opportunity to sample baseball’s healing power of redemption. Acquiring Santana was the cornerstone move of the off-season, the engine that would allow that to happen.
That was the plan. But sometimes there can be a wide gap between the way things are and the way you want them to be.
“You’re excited about what you do and you believe that you’ve done what you can to make things better,” Minaya said, shaking his head. “And then you have to hold your breath and hope that you’re right, wait until you see it with your eyes.”
The Mets saw it with their eyes yesterday. They have an ace. They have a foundation. They also have 161 games left on the calendar, most of them against far more worthy foes than this one, so there is much work still to be done. But for now, for one game, they can exhale again. Six months is a long time to hold your breath.