The worst 13 minutes of the season — worrying if Mike Cameron could move under his own power, worrying not just about a suddenly little thing like the rest of his season, but about his career and his life. It's astonishing to realize that Cameron has a broken nose, multiple fractures of both cheekbones and a slight concussion and that somehow counts as good news.
[Take those 13 minutes out and you'd have a taut but frustrating loss: Castro dropping a perfect throw at home for the first run, Glavine giving up a two-out hit for the second (on a ball Beltran might well have caught), Offerman and Wright not able to bring Reyes home after a leadoff walk and steal. Take those 13 minutes out and we'd be worrying about Floyd's knee and Roberto's hand. (How'd he get to 40 without learning not to stick his pitching hand up on a comebacker?) Take those 13 minutes out and we'd grouse that given the numbers, Piazza should have been facing Trevor Hoffman instead of Castro.]
But you can't take those 13 minutes out.
As fans we constantly run the risk of falling in love with people who wind up wearing our chosen laundry — players who may be taken away by trades or leave via free agency, or who may stay but lose their roles to other players who better fit what the team needs. Go too far down that road and you wind up rooting for the person first and the team second, when the very definition of team dictates that it has to be the other way around. But days like this are different. It's not that we're not allowed to worry about team things — if the players can go back out there after seeing Cammy carted off the field and attend to the player business of working counts and making pitches and all that, there's no shame in our attending to the fan business of worrying (in a decidedly small-'w' way) about what Florida and Washington and Philadelphia and Houston will do. But the fan business comes, if it comes at all, after getting the latest report on Cameron. (And Carlos Beltran too, of course.) Tonight it's the person to worry about first, and the team a distant second. Or third. Or tenth. Or not at all.
I heard the collision walking out of my office (Howie Rose never missed a beat even as the alarm leaked into his voice) and got home just in time to hear Randa step to the plate — not long in the workaday world, a frighteningly long time on a baseball field under the circumstances. I finally saw the replay after the game and felt my eyes involuntarily shut and my face twist into my shoulder.
Joshua saw it too, and saw my reaction, and stopped, staring at the TV. I had to tell him what happened, then explain it again. That they both dove for the ball. That they didn't see each other. That it was an accident. That Carlos seemed OK but had cuts and bumps and had to stop playing. That Mike was going to the hospital where a lot of doctors could see if he'd been badly hurt, and if he had been they could help him. Then I had to explain it a third, fourth, fifth, sixth time. After the sixth time Joshua said, sensing I was getting weary of this, “I'm just worried about the Mets who got hurt.”
“So am I,” I said. “It'll be OK.”
“Daddy,” he added after a moment, sounding oddly determined. “I don't want you to do something where you could get badly hurt.”
I started to tell him that I wasn't ever going to intentionally do anything where I could get badly hurt, but that accidents happen sometimes. Then I stopped. It wasn't the time for that.
“I won't,” I said.
Comments closed | | 
