I’m one of the few Mets fans to have had an uplifting Harvey Day Saturday. You might say I had a Charlie Day.
Charlie’s my father. Charles, really. Dad to me. Dad doesn’t care about baseball, which is why he doesn’t show up often in these pages. But this week Dad has been front and center in my thoughts because on Wednesday something was found on a CAT scan that necessitated his being hospitalized immediately and being operated on in an extraordinarily serious manner by Friday.
How did he come through it? Let’s just say I have a hunch Charles Prince will be playing rehab games before David Wright [1] and his stenosis [2] are cleared again for a single baseball activity.
This is Bonnie Franklin territory: one day at a time [3]. Yet the first day — Harvey Day in Pittsburgh — was a winner for the Prince home team. My dad was about as recovered as a person could ask for during his first full day of recovery from what amounted to life-saving surgery. What he had removed from his brain you shouldn’t know from. What he’ll be going through from here on out you shouldn’t know from. But you should know from championship form. We haven’t seen any in the Metsian sense since 1986; I’m seeing it this weekend from my 86-year-old father.
I also saw the Mets get Pirated on the TV in his hospital room, albeit with the sound mostly down and my attention mostly diverted. I tuned in to SNY while he was napping. We watched the last couple of innings of the 8-2 defeat [4] together. I’m tempted to call the game a disaster. I know it was in competitive terms.
Truth be told, though, I’m relatively happy, even with our ace’s best stuff having last been seen floating somewhere between the Allegheny and the Monongahela. My father eked out his first post-op win. Matt Harvey [5] will have another day.