Summer of Cespedes

Happy days in the hazy summer
Happy days being with each other
We’re gonna take a break by the rolling sea
The perfect summer, just you and me
—Chris Difford & Glen Tilbrook, “Happy Days,” 2015

Several players pushed the New York Mets to the brink of a breakthrough in 2015, but one more than any other was the reason they broke on through to the other side. For definitively opening the doors that allowed the Mets to gallop in the direction of the World Series, Faith and Fear in Flushing chooses Yoenis Cespedes as its Most Valuable Met of 2015.

I suppose this could be considered a controversial choice if one were to assume an award I made up on the spur of the moment ten years ago could inspire controversy. The arguable element would be the relatively brief tenure Cespedes had as a 2015 Met, never mind as a Met in general (probably). We’re bestowing the honor based on what he meant over 57 regular-season and 14 postseason games, admittedly a slight body of work.

But, oh, what a beautiful body.

There’d have been no contender to transform into a champion had it not been for the work of those who preceded Cespedes to the Metropolitan forefront. They deserve acknowledgement in any discussion of Mets who were most valuable.

• Curtis Granderson grew increasingly reliable as 2015 progressed and was the team’s best player as it vied for a world title.

• When all the Mets had was their pitching, no pitcher meant more to their ability to stick close to the Nationals than Jacob deGrom.

• Jeurys Familia greatly diminished the anxieties we associated with ninth-inning leads for an eternity.

• Matt Harvey returned from a prolonged absence, almost seamlessly resumed his place among baseball’s elite starters (innings-limit kerfuffle notwithstanding) and elevated the Mets’ rotation from promising to formidable to practically unmatched.

• Daniel Murphy owned a stretch of October in a fashion no batter before him had.

• Wilmer Flores signed his name across the heart of a glorious season when he hit its signature home run.

Each one of them, a Met from Opening Day to Closing Night, made an indelible let alone valuable contribution to perhaps the best Met year in almost three decades.

Yet quality overwhelmed quantity in selecting Cespedes as our MVM. Rarely can a Met be said to have changed everything for the better in an instant. Yoenis did. On the last morning Cespedes woke up as a Detroit Tiger, the Mets were two games over .500 and three games out of first place. Within four weeks, the Mets were fifteen above the break-even mark and six-and-a-half ahead of second-place Washington.

It was no coincidence. Cespedes’s presence and performance reconfigured a team that had been struggling to score runs for months to a team that scored eight or more runs eight separate times in those first four weeks. He made everybody around him better, starting with his first night in the lineup, August 1, when Nationals manager Matt Williams intentionally walked Cespedes to get to Lucas Duda in a critical situation. Duda had already homered twice that Saturday night, but the notion of facing Cespedes worried Williams more. There’s no telling what Yoenis would have done against Matt Thornton with Curtis Granderson on second and one out, but we know that Duda lashed a double, gave the Mets a 3-2 lead that turned into the second win in that showdown series. The Mets swept the Nats the next night and the N.L. East was never the same.

You hadn’t seen that kind of protection pay off since My Bodyguard.

Donn Clendenon was, for 45 years, the blue and orange standard for in-season impact acquisitions. Clendenon came to the Mets from Montreal on June 15, 1969. On October 16, 1969, he was accepting the World Series MVP award. It’s impossible to imagine the Mets coming of age in four months without the contribution of Clendenon. He was the righty bat Gil Hodges needed to platoon with Ed Kranepool at first. He was a veteran voice on a youthful team. He was an essential element of a budding world champion. His production in 72 regular-season games as a 1969 Met — 12 HR, 37 RBI — was contextually solid if not statistically spectacular. Clendenon deserves the reverence in which he is held these many decades later.

Yet all told, Yoenis Cespedes was the approximate equivalent of four, maybe five Donn Clendenons. We have a new example to throw at future GMs when trading deadlines roll around in seasons to come. “What we really need,” we will insist to one another, “is another Cespedes.”

The 2015 Mets had nobody like Cespedes before Sandy Alderson poached him from the Tigers on July 31. The Mets in 54 years of existence never had anybody like the Cespedes who went on the tear of tears almost immediately. In 41 games, Yoenis belted 17 home runs, drove in 42 runs and batted .309. His OPS required four digits: 1.048. By no coincidence, the Mets won almost three of every four games they played and put the division away. In the single most important September series they played in this century — September 7-9 in Washington — Peerless Yo from near Manzanillo was beyond scalding: three doubles, two homers, seven ribbies and game-altering swings in the second (three-run double that drew the Mets from 7-3 to 7-6 in the seventh) and third (two-run homer that sent the Mets ahead, 5-3 in the eighth) games.

Plus there was the style, which only sometimes made an impression in the box score but always got your attention. The neon compression sleeve that dazzled clear up to Promenade. The parakeet that seemed born to be his wingman. The custom tune (“Cespedes!”) to which he strolled to the plate at Citi Field. The cannon of an arm, which yielded a memorable 8-5 assist, when he threw Sean Rodriguez of the Pirates the hell out at third. The follow-through down to one knee that evoked images of Willie Mays in the batter’s box. The steal of third on the night he launched three home runs in Denver because you can never have too many runs at Coors Field. The sense of inevitability his bat brought to bear when the Mets absolutely, positively had to win nearly every night. Cespedes started twelve games between September 1 and September 14; he homered in nine of them.

By then, the Mets’ lead over the Nationals had risen to 9½ and their Magic Number to clinch the East had dwindled to 10. Yoenis Cespedes was acquired to make a difference in the franchise’s first pennant race in seven years, and he made all the difference.

Good thing he was so effective so soon, because beginning September 15, his mojo started wearing off. The man had been all mojo all the time for more than six weeks. Then he was hit on the hip by a Tom Koehler pitch and he wasn’t quite the same in form or result. He absorbed another blow late in the year, this one off his fingers from Justin De Fratus. By then, the mojo was a memory. The division that fell so easily to the Mets was already clinched and the concern was whether Cespedes was going to be all right for the playoffs…the playoffs that probably wouldn’t have materialized without him.

Physically, he was fine in the postseason. Occasionally, he made you remember how he injected the summer with an adrenaline shot straight outta Pulp Fiction. There was a home run he catapulted into the Left Field Landing against the Dodgers. There was a key run he swiped against the Cubs. But the Yoenis of autumn was a more mortal creature. The regular-season shortcomings that were almost charming in that at least they proved he was human — blips in which he didn’t field crisply or resist pitches patiently or run to first urgently — came to define his game. The World Series was a nightmare for Cespedes: dismal defense that put the Mets behind immediately in Game One; horrid basepath judgment that snuffed out the Mets’ hopes in Game Four; a debilitating foul ball off his leg in Game Five, which is one of those things that could happen to anybody, but it was accompanied by a foolish insistence on staying in to (futilely) finish his at-bat when he could barely walk. A Kirk Gibson moment it wasn’t. Cespedes had to leave, and without him, the Mets went down to their final defeat of the year.

Yoenis couldn’t have been less valuable in the World Series. And the Mets wouldn’t have landed anywhere near it without him.

Intermittently, our summer guest made polite noises about wanting to remain a Met for the long term. It was an alluring idea when everything was going great, but when Yoenis’s flaws started to obscure his talents, it was easy to envision recurring statements circa 2018 along the lines of “once Cespedes’s contract is off the books, maybe the Mets can fill some of their gaping holes.” That was if you dared to envision the Mets digging deep (or Yoenis offering an adopted-hometown discount) to extend his stay. The club showed no inclination to pay a player of Cespedes’s caliber before they picked up the final months of his old deal and they’ve given no indication they are of a mindset or in a position to commence doing so now.

The remainder of the offseason will confirm what seemed likely from the end of July to the dawn of November, that Yoenis Cespedes was a loaner vehicle. It was kind of a shame when we realized we almost certainly couldn’t keep him, but in retrospect, it was shocking we were handed the keys at all. What a sweet ride he gave us.

FAITH AND FEAR’S PREVIOUS MOST VALUABLE METS
2005: Pedro Martinez
2006: Carlos Beltran
2007: David Wright
2008: Johan Santana
2009: Pedro Feliciano
2010: R.A. Dickey
2011: Jose Reyes
2012: R.A. Dickey
2013: Daniel Murphy, Dillon Gee and LaTroy Hawkins
2014: Jacob deGrom

Still to come: The Nikon Camera Player of the Year for 2015.