PORT ST. LUCIE – The sign is unmistak able, hanging as it does right above the portal connecting the clubhouse at the Mets’ minor league facility to the wide green fields beyond. It is also terribly ironic, if you’re looking for a kind way to put it.
Or pathetic, if you aren’t so concerned about niceties.
“Through these doors pass the best players in baseball.”
It is starting again, the grind, the crushing daily push of baseball, and the signs are unmistakable. Pitchers and catchers began sprinkling into Tradition Field just past dusk, some early arriving position players swelling the numbers at the fields, giving the morning a full cast of characters in T-shirts, shorts, sweatsocks and sneakers.
These are the days when it is worth remembering just what awaits you during the course of a baseball season, just how much time must pass between now and the final hours of a season. Around here, that time is marked precisely and purposefully, because the last two editions of the Mets have proven, as much as any team ever has, how long that march can be.
Which brings us back to the sign, something that might have seemed fitting two years ago, when the Mets were fresh off a 97-win season that fell two runs short of the World Series; might have seemed like the most basic kind of renewing motivation a year ago, after the epic collapse that scarred Mets fans like a cattle brand.
And now seems, well, pathetic. And sad. A reminder that, two years running, the Mets really did look like one of the best teams in baseball for 161 games, for 5 3/4 months, for about as long as you can honestly look like a championship team without being a championship team, without even qualifying to compete for a championship.
As one artful practitioner of gallows humor observed yesterday, spying the sign: “I didn’t realize we were in Clearwater.” As in, the winter home of the Phillies.
As in, “Ouch.”
So this is where it begins, another round of healing, another round of redemption, another round of the Mets trying to overcome themselves and their flawed history, trying to set aside this terrible burden they’ve created for themselves.
Last year, the Mets seemed constantly annoyed whenever the flop of 2007 was brought up to them, then proceeded to play in such a way that it is guaranteed to haunt them for another full calendar year.
“I don’t want them to forget about what happened to them last year,” manager Jerry Manuel said time and again last September, with history repeating itself, with the Mets adding a sour twist to the adjective that had always merrily defined them: amazing. “I want them to do something about what happened to them last year.”
They never did. They never could. They were right there, again, after 161 games, and then, in Game 162, with everything to play for against a team with nothing to play for, they went all Tin Man on their fans, this time on the last day that Shea Stadium would ever open its doors.
One more hard lesson on the true length of the long season.
And now here they were, together again, Manuel laughing, Johan Santana and Freddy Garcia exchanging easy and breezy words with his fellow Venezuelan and (the Mets hope) fellow rotation stalwart, Oliver Perez dispensing hugs, John Maine talking trash about golf, everyone easing in to the long burden ahead.
“I feel like I have a new arm,” Garcia said hopefully, talking about his chances of winning the No. 5 starter role from Jon Niese and Tim Redding, and for a pitcher on the mend that is precisely the outlook to take.
For a team on the mend, it isn’t much different. It must feel like a new year because it is a new year, because the Mets have no physical responsibility to keep playing 2007 and 2008 even as they play 2009.
The psychological burden is something else altogether.