WASHINGTON — They are supposed to stay true to the moment at hand, especially at these prices, especially when it is no longer just a strong personal investment to devote your passions to either of the local nines, but also a fierce fiscal one, too.
So even as the Mets took the field Tuesday night, beating the Nationals 6-1 to start what surely feels like a last-stand series, you never will hear them say that any player off the 25-man roster is more important, or interesting, than those that comprise it.
And back home, even as the feisty Yankees play the rare role of upstart underdogs against the mighty Tigers, there remains talk of catching fire, catching a wave, catching lightning in a bottle — and only cautious chatter revolving around the man as responsible as anyone for allowing them to stay this close to the AL leadership.
“We have too much at stake today,” Mets manager Terry Collins said recently, “to be able to think a whole lot about tomorrow.”
And yet, despite flickering spasms of hope on the Queens end of the RFK Bridge and stout pledges of promise on the Bronx side, it is impossible not to postpone today in favor of tomorrow, at least occasionally, especially this week, when the city’s two brightest baseball lights reported for work, broke a sweat, and officially began feeding the dueling baseball engines of caution and optimism.
Monday it was Masahiro Tanaka at Yankee Stadium, throwing 20 times on flat ground, at a distance of 60 feet, his first toe back in the water as he tries to will his way through a small elbow tear, avoid an operating room.
Tuesday it was Matt Harvey in Port St. Lucie, Fla., also throwing 20 times, those from a pitcher’s mound at the Mets’ spring-training complex, a notable benchmark as he returns from the same Tommy John surgery Tanaka hopes to avoid, 19 days shy of a year since he last threw a pitch in anger (it was the Tigers in town that day, too).
Both teams still are talking of competing this calendar year, even if the Mets’ wish remains far more theoretical even with Tuesday’s feel-good win, while the Yanks’ unspoken goal, from a practical and rational point of view, simply is to be able to throw the gates open for a few nights in October, reap those windfalls that were absent last autumn. And that they must do, even if it’s plain there’s not a lot of championship timber in the house.
So much of what both teams aspire to be, and become, revolves around two players limited this week to doing the most fundamental thing the sport allows: having a catch. Tanaka’s was literally that, straight out of an Iowa cornfield. Harvey’s was more intense but those were 20 fastballs he was heaving, no messing around with breaking stuff, no way, not yet.
“It feels like nothing ever happened,” Harvey told reporters after his workout, which was televised back to New York, which means that at long last the Mets are conceding to the overwhelming truth of the season: that even in absentia, and even as they cling to the fringes of contention, Harvey remains the planet around which everything else revolves in Flushing.
Perhaps you can understand why the Mets were so obstinate arguing the other way, because they are so often accused — rightly, mostly — of punting the present for any number of reasons, from fiscal to philosophical. Even if they treated the offseason as if they had hit the pause button until 2015, even the Mets never would admit as much for the record.
Now? Why not? Why not generate something, especially if this road trip sours? Especially since, barring a hard-to-fathom stretch run, the most interesting stories the rest of the way may well involve Harvey’s restless desire to push his recovery and pitch in a real game set against the Mets’ intent — proper and understandable, by the way — to err on the side of caution.
And even that is fine. Harvey should be restless, should be champing at the bit, and the Mets should do all they can to keep the cornerstone’s eyes on the bigger prize. And fans should be fascinated with both of these recoveries, both of these comebacks, both of these pitchers. Both reminded this city just how electric appointment baseball can be — Harvey for five months in 2013, Tanaka across the first three of ’14.
You, after all, aren’t like the players, the managers, the owners. You are free to dream about tomorrow. That’s not only allowed, after all. It’s encouraged. Practically mandatory.