Pour yourself two fingers of your favorite morning beverage (or perhaps something stronger; no judgments) and drink to the digital flexibility of Yoenis Cespedes [1]…and to the postseason not being over before it begins.
Cespedes is nursing a bruise that covers his left ring and middle fingers [2] after his hand got in the way of a Justin De Fratus [3] pitch in the third inning of Wednesday night’s Citizens Bank slog. As he knelt in obvious pain, the 2015 NLDS flashed before our eyes and it was over in a blink. When word emerged three innings later that the X-ray review ruled it a contusion — and that contusion is a fancy word for bruise — it appeared the republic would survive to fight another day.
Let’s hope Yoenis followed Keith Hernandez [4]’s sage advice and iced the fudge out of those fingers overnight. And let’s hope Cespedes responds to this HBP the way characters on your Gilligan’s Island-type sitcoms would respond when conked on the noggin a second time. Our slugger/savior, it will be recalled, was merrily bopping along, having blasted 17 home runs in just over a month’s time (enough to lead nine previous Met squads in homers over the course of their full seasons), when he took a pitch to the hip on September 15. He hasn’t homered since.
“If hitting him with a pitch turned off his power,” the Professor might have theorized to the Skipper, “Hitting him again might turn it back on. I know it’s unorthodox, but it may be our only hope.” At which point the Skipper apologizes to his Little Buddy before whapping him on the coconut with a coconut. And somehow the radio works again, even if you probably can’t get WOR very well in the middle of the Pacific (or many other places) and even if nobody is rescued until somebody thinks to make a TV movie more than a decade later [5].
The crew of the S.S. Minnow set out on a three-hour cruise, or for one hour fewer than Wednesday night’s ball of contusion lasted. Otherwise, the whole affair seemed to be an uncanny remake of The Flushing Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island [6]. A tropical storm loomed; every Mets baserunner from the second inning onward wound up a castaway; the “I’m telling you, Steven Matz [7] is going to be seaworthy when the time comes” plot point sprang another leak [8]; and Hansel Robles [9] portrayed a pretty unconvincing headhunter [10].
Hard to believe the episode started frothily enough, with the Mets plastering five runs on the scoreboard in the top of the first, as Daniel Murphy [11] and Michael Conforto [12] each took Alec Asher [13] on a tour of the many lovely areas beyond the Citizens Bank Park outfield fence. At 5-0, it shaped up as the most laughable of laughers. The audience simply assumed that against the bottom-dwelling Phillies we’d soon have a 90th win (not quite); an additional leg up for home field advantage (nope, though the Dodgers lost, so we still lead that mini-race by one length); and a relaxing evening to enjoy that rare state of grace between clinching a title and battling for a bigger one (alas, Wednesday’s 7-5 loss [14] dropped the Mets’ lifetime record to 34-17 in regular-season contests they’ve played as a playoff qualifier — why, yes, there is a stat for everything).
When the shining highlight of your baseball game is your best player being hit in the hand but not so badly that anything was broken, it can be definitively stated that nothing good happened. Except that the game eventually ended. That was pretty good. And a week from today, should Cespedes find himself gripping a bat free of pain in playoff competition, that will be a victory.