MIAMI — The domestic portion of the major league season opened last night with two teams that are everything the Mets are not these days, including the current employers of Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes.
The Cardinals are the defending champs. They are now the only organization in the majors to win two titles since Oct. 19, 2006. That would be the day Beltran watched a called third strike from Adam Wainwright at Shea Stadium, finalizing NLCS Game 7, sending the Mets into a death spiral from which they really have never emerged.
“They took off from there,” David Wright told me the other day. “And we regressed. There is just no denying that.”
St. Louis has built an organization in which it could lose its signature player, Albert Pujols, and still be viewed as fully capable of winning the NL Central in 2012. In part that is because of a full-circle irony in which Beltran and Wainwright are now teammates.
The Mets, of course, are not in a financial place to lose their signature player, Reyes, and do much more than touch their roster at the margins. Between bad front office decisions and the Madoff-induced financial hit to ownership, the Mets squandered the goodwill and financial faucet that should still exist from opening a new stadium in 2009.
Instead the pomp, euphoria and Reyes now have moved to South Florida, where Marlins Park was officially christened last night. Beltran got the first regular-season hit in the building and Reyes got the first hit for the Marlins — albeit not until he led off the seventh inning.
By then, Kyle Lohse had deflated some of the life from the noisy proceedings with six no-hit innings in what became a 4-1 Cardinals triumph.
Still a single loss will not douse the optimism that encased the Marlins for chasing Pujols in free agency and actually changing the image of the franchise by signing Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Heath Bell. They took their payroll and expectations up as the opposite was occurring in Flushing.
There is glitz around the organization that begins with the vibrant colors and garish touches of this $634 million, retractable-roof facility, which could just as easily double as the largest disco in the world. They have a Jets-ian brash feel about them from the verbal jousts of manager Ozzie Guillen, the confident strut of owner Jeffrey Loria, the orange-dyed hair of Reyes and Hanley Ramirez, and the moon-shot abilities of Giancarlo Stanton. They will be the stars of the major leagues’ “Hard Knocks” ripoff, “The Franchise” on Showtime, and undoubtedly will end their six-year run of ranking last in NL attendance.
Jets coach Rex Ryan would look right amid the soap-opera potential and the unrestrained goal to win — and win now.
Look, it all could be ephemeral. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the stadium financing. There are questions if there is enough local passion to retain fans once the novelty of the stadium fades. But, for now, the Marlins are an “It” team.
The Mets, of course, are not. They are universally viewed as the fifth-best team in a division deepened at the top, in part, by the Marlins’ financial splash. For the Mets, the perception was ownership won recently in court in the Madoff matter and, thus, fans that hungered for change lost.
Commissioner Bud Selig was in attendance at Marlins Park and bragged about the abundance of hope and faith dotting the major league landscape. But he is too much of a baseball historian to see the Mets as more than a good stock for the future; when the monetary spigot may just open again.
“I’m hopeful,” Selig said about the overall state of the franchise. “The settlement that was made was a positive one. … I am really hopeful now that Fred [Wilpon] — and it is no secret that I have enormous affection for Fred — can move forward. He believes they can and I do, too.”
For now, the Mets are not the steady Cardinals or the glitzy Marlins. The run that was supposed to be built, to some large extent, around Beltran and Reyes never materialized. Beltran put a brace on his right knee in the St. Louis clubhouse and then went out and got two hits. Reyes shimmied behind a batting cage with Ramirez and then produced two of the Marlins’ four hits.
The domestic portion of the season began last night without the Mets — in so many ways.