The more you watch baseball and the more you mature as a person, the less you are inclined to blithely dismiss the people who play the game in a glib, pejorative fashion. For example, it would have been shallow and unfair of me to have thought, in 2011, “My god, Chris Capuano and Chris Young are two of the most boring people I’ve ever seen pitch for the Mets.”
But I kind of thought so anyway. I was just a callow lad of 48 back then.
At the wised-up age of 49, I see the Chrises for what they are: calm veteran presences who have persevered through injury and recovery, using their wiles and wits to retire batters because their arms will never be what they were when they younger, yet their guts and guile more than make up for it. Sure they’re incredibly low-key and almost never said anything particularly interesting for public consumption when they were teammates — with Young going out for the season early and Capuano muddling through the schedule in a state of mostly mediocrity — but each is pitching at the top of his craft presently. We certainly are lucky to have Chris Young adding gravitas to our rotation; watching him outduel Chris Capuano [1], who is excelling in his post-Met incarnation, was a real treat Thursday night.
And I’m sure the only reason I kept nodding off on them was the West Coast start time.