THIS was an afternoon plucked straight out of the blueprints, the camp kids in their colored T-shirts scattered throughout the 40,000 people in the seats, the sun shining high in a cloudless sky, the Mets scoring runs in bunches, Johan Santana mowing down Colorado Rockies while barely breaking a sweat.
Yes, it was the ideal soundtrack of summer: kids squealing, fans roaring, bats cracking, mitts popping, executives apologizing.
Oh. Right. Reality.
“You guys know me,” Omar Minaya said yesterday, as the Mets turned another news cycle into a dance marathon, into their own twisted version of ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ “You know that wasn’t me. You know that was out of character.”
This was yesterday morning, inside the Mets dugout alongside first base, maybe an hour before the first pitch of what became a 7-0 Mets victory in the opener of a day-night double-header at Citi Field. The incident for which Minaya was apologizing had taken place Monday. Four days earlier.
Four days? It doesn’t take that long to bury a pope, a princess or a President. Hollywood marriages sometimes don’t last that long. In four days you can go boom, broke, bust and back again in Vegas, and have a few hours left over to graze at the buffet.
And yet somehow, with the Mets playing some of their crispest, sharpest, best baseball of the season, a brand their fans have waited four months to see, we are treated to daily doses of regret, remorse and repentance. The Mets have turned Citi Field into the world’s largest outdoor confessional. After Angel Pagan grounded out to first leading off the bottom of the first, you weren’t sure if he would jog back to the dugout or start beseeching fans for forgiveness one by one.
The Mets never learn. They really don’t. Think of it: You may never be given an easier task than the Mets had the past few weeks, finding enough ammunition to fire Tony Bernazard. Are you kidding? That’s like trying to find kids who like Christmas. I would say Bernazard was lined up for them on a tee, but that would be an insult to T-ball players worldwide, who have a harder time with their task than the Mets should have had with theirs.
And yet, this has absorbed nearly a full week of our time. What should have been a press release became a fiasco of a press conference, and then an impromptu mea culpa, and then an ownership apology, and then a day of rain (since God, apparently, was just as worn out by this story as the rest of us) and then finally (we think, we hope, we were promised) the grand finale, an apology from Minaya in which he apologized for his past apology, but not as much for what he felt as what he said.
And that was OK, actually. That, in fact, may be the most honest part of the whole thing, the whole week, the whole sorry mess. A one-paragraph story becomes a four-day story, a team teeters and totters on the brink, dogs and cats living together, total chaos.
And all the while, as an aside, there is baseball going.
“What happens on the field,” David Wright said, “is a whole lot different than whatever drama is taking place off the field.”
Actually, not so long ago, they would have been the perfect matched set. Just a week ago today, the Mets were coming off two indifferent losses to the Nationals, Santana was getting smacked around Minute Maid Park by the Astros, the team was seven games south of .500 and not only careening out the fringes of playoff contention but straight into the abyss.
“I always felt there were going to be better days ahead,” Wright said, “because they couldn’t possibly get much worse.”
For now, he is right. And for now, in what has to qualify as one of the biggest upsets since the football got stuck on David Tyree’s helmet, it is the baseball begging to take people’s minds off the Mets’ other woes, and not the other way around. I never saw that coming. Sorry.