On the road, Curtis Granderson finally looked at home.
Making his first appearance on the other side of the Subway Series, the former Yankee and first-year Met looked as comfortable as he has all season, back at Yankee Stadium on Monday night as a visitor for the first time in five seasons.
Batting .185 entering the game, the Mets’ big free-agent signing reverted to his Yankee form in his former stadium, going 2-for-5 with a home run and two RBIs in the Mets’ 9-7 win.
While enjoying the surroundings of the park where he recorded back-to-back 40-plus homer seasons (2011-12), Granderson received a chilly reception in his first at-bat on a warm Bronx night, a mixture of boos and cheers that leaned heavily in favor of the former, though it was impossible to decipher which fans were responsible for what sounds.
“It was one of the things I was expecting, a mixture of things,” Granderson said. “Obviously Yankee fans are going to be here and cheer for the Yankees because I don’t play for the Yankees anymore, and there were going to be some Yankee fans that hopefully were happy to see me back. And obviously Mets fans came out in droves, so it was a combination of things and it went really well.”
Before the game, Granderson avoided comparing Yankee Stadium with the far fences of Citi Field, but by the sixth inning, it was obvious how much he missed his old haunt.
With the Mets trailing 4-2 in the sixth inning, Granderson jumped on a 3-0 fastball from Hiroki Kuroda and blasted a game-tying two-run homer — his fourth of the season — into the right-field stands, the short porch responsible for many of his 65 home runs in The Bronx.
“It felt good. Anytime you get a chance to drive the baseball like that, it feels pretty good when you barrel it up,” said Granderson, who is batting .325 in May. “Against a guy like Kuroda, who doesn’t give you too many pitches to hit, the fact that it was 3-0 was probably the only reason I got a pitch that was going to be around the zone that I could do something with.”
With two hits in the box score, Granderson got the chance to play hero once more, coming up with the Mets down 7-6 in the sixth inning and Daniel Murphy on first base.
In a rare moment this season when the Mets wanted the bat in Granderson’s hands, Murphy took the bat out of them as he was caught stealing second base to end the seventh inning.
But the Mets won. And another chance comes Tuesday, when Granderson returns to see the short porch once more.