He isn’t a one-man band of futility, though it does feel that way sometimes.
Chris Young isn’t all that ails the Mets. He isn’t the only muffled bat in the order. He isn’t the one who threw the wild pitch that tied the game; Jeurys Familia did that. He didn’t serve up the game-winner to Pablo Sandoval; Jenrry Mejia did that.
So maybe doing what needs to be done with Young will feel like the worst kind of scapegoating, blaming him for things that aren’t of his doing, identifying one crack in a driveway in Sausalito as the source of the San Andreas Fault. Maybe that’ll make Sandy Alderson feel sad.
Doesn’t matter.
The continuing presence of Young on this roster smacks of contradiction. Alderson has talked tough for years about demanding a culture of accountability on this club. Four months into a season that now sits six games under .500 after Monday’s dyspeptic 4-3 loss to the Giants, Young has plainly shown that his five-year tumble was no aberration, and it should be clear to Alderson that his gamble belongs with the rest of the torn-up tickets at Aqueduct.
Yet on he stays. And on he plays. And as long as that happens, there will be the even greater and grander contradiction that clings to the Mets like a stubborn miasma: that they are too cheap to do the right thing. That even with less than a third of their $7.25 million commitment to Young remaining, they are too deep in the poorhouse to even consider doing something that wouldn’t only send the sacred memorandum of accountability to their team, but would be an even louder message to their distressed and dispirited fan base:
We can’t watch him anymore, either.
“We have to win games,” Terry Collins said Monday, and when he was asked if he was content with a week that included a series win over the Phillies and playing one of the NL’s best teams close in three-quarters of another, the manager who far too often sees the glass half-full when there’s barely a drop at the bottom said: “No. I won’t say that’s a good homestand.”
The Mets want very much to believe they are still active in the playoff hunt, even as they depart for three likely tipping-point games in Washington, even as they remain seven games out with five teams to pass. They are, after all, the one team that can point to a specific point in history — why not 41 years ago: Tuesday, Aug. 5, 1973 — and see a time when they were 12 games under and 12 games out and needing to pass, yes, five teams. And did.
Hope is no sin. Delusion is. Hoping for an August to replicate their July is a reasonable goal, still. Expecting Young to magically transform into the player he was as a 23-year-old rookie seven years ago is irrational. The Mets did make one easy transaction Monday, designating Bobby Abreu for assignment, but at least Abreu was a source of positive energy in his time here, a mentor for some of the younger Mets, a consummate pro whose only mistake was looking, and playing, like the 40-year-old man he is.
Young is 10 years younger, but every day, every game, he invents ways to aggravate and agitate. He’s not unlike Eddie Mush, the poor schlub in “A Bronx Tale” who managed to turn every bet bad, no matter how sure a thing. Everything Young touches turns to zinc.
Monday, with the Mets guarding a 3-2 lead in the seventh, Hunter Pence hit a deep fly ball to left-center. Every eye in Citi Field, as is customary now, turned to Juan Lagares, once it was clear it was staying in the yard. Lagares leapt — the beginning of a lot of “holy bleep” moments in his young career so far — and …
And never touched the ball, because Young had beaten him to the jump, ticked it first, helped turn a web gem into a triple, and eventually a tie game. That’s the thing: Young tries. He seems to be a fine clubhouse gentleman, he isn’t the cancer that Dan Uggla turned into toward the end in Atlanta. He’s just so contaminated now as a player that he can even involve Juan Lagares in a Marvelous Marv moment.
In “A Bronx Tale,” Sonny’s crew would lock Mush in a bathroom whenever his bad luck grew contagious. The Mets don’t have to be so cruel. They simply have to set him free. Proving they really do believe in accountability. And really don’t have to clip coupons to keep the doors at Citi open.