PORT ST. LUCIE – He was on the other side of field five months ago, which might as well have been the other side of the planet, and Ryan Church couldn’t get enough of it. The insults, the cat calls, the unprintable oaths: That’s what you expect when you’re an opposing player playing big September games in New York.
Of course, as this was Shea Stadium, in the midst of the worst week in the history of its primary tenant, there was a little twist in that particular plot: After a while, it wasn’t only Church and the other members of the Washington Nationals getting that treatment from the angst-ridden mob in the stands.
“An awful lot of [ticked] off people,” Church, the Mets’ right fielder, said yesterday morning, smiling, spitting tobacco into a paper cup, enjoying the memory a lot more from his spot in that battle than any of his present teammates probably do.
This is the reality these Mets face, starting today, when there will be pitchers and catchers littering Tradition Field for the very first time in 2008. The last time a group of officially sanctioned Mets walked off a field, it was with a collective look of dazed bewilderment. They’d been slaughtered by the Marlins. Word would soon arrive that the Phillies were hammering the Nats in Philadelphia. The cause was lost. And so was the season.
“We all know we wasted a golden opportunity,” Willie Randolph said yesterday, greeting at once both the assembled media and the prospect of a fresh baseball start. “We had a situation in hand that we blew.”
Randolph admitted it took him “until the holidays” before he was feeling himself again; there are plenty of Met fans who’d like to ask him what his secret is, because a lot of them still haven’t gotten over it. And won’t for a long time.
“We were still one of the best teams in the National League, maybe the best team in the National League, for most of the year,” Randolph said. “What happened at the end was terrible, but it shouldn’t get in the way of remembering how good we can be.”
The problem is, what happened at the end will define this team, this collection of players, and this manager, until they do something to make people forget it. Sometimes, teams can shake off collapses; the ’51 Dodgers, for instance, made the World Series in four of the next five years, won it all in 1955. But it took the Red Sox eight long years to land back in the playoffs after blowing the 1978 pennant; it took the Phillies 12 years to recover from 1964.
“We walked into Shea the final week,” Church, the erstwhile Nat, remembered, “and you could just sense how much pressure they were under, and how badly they wanted to win those games. Sometimes, it can want it too badly.”
That is Church’s new reality, a team and a town whose expectations are officially through the sky. The Mets spent a lot of time last year enjoying a victory lap they never got around to earning, and they play in a city with a long, fitful memory.
It is Randolph’s new reality that the honeymoon he so thoroughly enjoyed across three years of growth and prosperity is officially over. There is no such thing as incremental progress now, not after the Great Deluge of ’07. There were factions of both the fan base and the organization that wanted Randolph gone last autumn; they will not be sated if the spring doesn’t start as it should.
“I don’t feel any extra pressure,” he said. “There’s always the usual pressures of this job and of New York, but nothing extra.”
It’s good that he feels that way, because last September his baseball team gave everyone a clinic on what can happen when pressure becomes the 10,000-pound elephant inside a clubhouse. They have new weapons this year, better weapons. They have an honest-to-goodness ace for the first time in two decades. They have a healthy and happy Pedro Martinez. They have an offense that looks, 1-to-7 anyway, as potentially potent as any in baseball.
They should be able to fix the ending. But “should” won’t be good enough. Not this year. Not after last year.