This was Terry Collins talking as a baseball fan, more than a baseball man. This was the bottom of the fifth inning Monday night, Yankee Stadium, the Mets scuffling along, trying to figure out a way to come back against the Yankees, Collins retreated to the visiting clubhouse to get a cup of coffee.
He returned bearing more than a cup of joe.
He also had a slice of reality for everybody.
“It’s an elbow tear,” came the news. “Tommy John Surgery.”
Nobody in the dugout needed the identity, because the name was on the tips of everybody’s tongues already: Jose Fernandez, who across the first 13 months of his major league career had taken the sport by storm with his youth, his poise, and his fastball. Friday night in San Diego he had looked less than himself.
By Monday morning in Los Angeles, he was joining the vast array of young arms in the shop for repair.
“That hit everybody,” Collins said. “That got everyone’s attention. That’s big, big, big news.”
And not just in the gallows sense, either, since baseball is a fraternity, and even if the Marlins minus Fernandez equals an easier path for the Mets to negotiate in the NL East … nobody in the game ever would go there. Even if the Mets hadn’t already experienced the exact same loss in Matt Harvey eight months ago.
“All of us in baseball, it’s very sad, because what we want is to watch the greatest players play,” Collins said. “And this is a very special kid, and feel really bad about it even if there’s nothing you can do about it. These are big, strong guys putting a lot of stress on their bodies … ”
And then Collins went to a stand-by story, one he goes to — wistfully, always — whenever the subject turns to gifted pitchers and the meal-ticket arms that sometimes betray them. It was a chat he had with the late Dr. Frank Jobe back when Collins was managing the Angels.
“No matter how hard you try,” Jobe told him, “if they’re gonna break, they’re gonna break.”
And so we have the final two games at Citi Field, for these last two games of the 2014 Subway Series, when the Mets and the Yankees will start two rookies apiece — damn the stage, damn the consequences.
Now, one of those Yankees is named Masahiro Tanaka, who was brilliant Wednesday, throwing a four-hit shutout and furthering his legend barely six weeks into his career as the Yankees beat the Mets 4-0. He is a rookie in name only. But they will throw Chase Whitley, who only recently became a source of intrigue as a rotation piece and has made the most of it, pitching to a 2.39 ERA at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, with 32 strikeouts and just seven walks in 26 1/3 innings.
The Yankees, for sure, can use some good news in a year when 60 percent of their starting staff is disabled, and if Whitley becomes a good fall-out-of-the-sky story along the lines of Ivan Nova and Chien-Ming Wang from recent years, that will be a terrific story.
The Mets’ daily double of Rafael Montero — who had his moments Wednesday — and Jacob deGrom, though, will be the ones that will be viewed through the increasingly harsh prism of the modern baseball team. Both have been on the Mets’ minds, and in their plans, and if neither was necessarily the high-profile comers Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler were before them, or that Noah Syndergaard is now, they certainly do form a portion of the pool of youngsters around which so many Mets plans are based.
And the key element of that pool is keeping those young arms healthy.
That’s the dark cloud hovering in baseball’s sky now. Any young arm that lights up a radar gun — and, by association, electrifies a fan base — is accompanied by dread. Not all of them wind up on an operating table, the subject of dugout buzz across the sport. But too many of them do. You have to believe the Royals, and Kansas City baseball fans at large, watch Yordano Venura’s every pitch with baited breath, wondering what any 2-3 mph dip in velocity means.
As always, baseball is a game defined by pitching. But if they’re gonna break …