Here are two scenes from two Florida locales at the outset of Spring Training.
1) Lucas Duda [1] is asked about the throw that got away and, with it, the World Series. He replies [2]:
“That’s a throw I can make nine out of ten times, and that happened to be the one I didn’t […] I’ve watched it a few times. He was dead to rights. I wish I would have got him. No excuses. I threw the ball away.”
2) Jon Niese [3] discusses pitching on the night his son was born:
“That’s when it all went downhill […] If I wouldn’t have pitched that game, I probably would have stayed the course, stayed in a rhythm, but that just kind of knocked me off.”
Duda is still a Met and quite a mensch. Niese is a Pirate with an alibi.
The play which Duda was asked about in Port St. Lucie on Thursday is already legendary from a Kansas City perspective. If there are still sports bars, photographs and frames a century from now, a framed photograph of Eric Hosmer [4] scoring on Duda’s terrible ninth-inning throw — thus tying the score of the fifth game of the 2015 World Series — will likely hang in every sports bar in western Missouri and eastern Kansas.
It was a happy episode for Hosmer and Royals fans. It’s haunting for us and Duda. Duda said so. No practiced amnesia for him. Also, no alibis. The light didn’t get in his eyes. The noise didn’t get in his ears. The angle wasn’t troubling. Some bump in the road from several months before didn’t rise up to swallow his ability. He just didn’t make a play he could’ve/should’ve made. He owns up to it in honest, forthright fashion and has folded it into his experiential portfolio, planning to “learn from it, grow from it and kind of fuel me”.
Absorbing the Quotes of Spring [5] from the defending National League champions, it seems the bulk of the Mets are revved up for another go at postseason fulfillment. Nobody wants to evince overconfidence (let alone cockiness), but the sense of purpose is palpable. It’s not only different from every spring thing we’re used to lately, it’s a step up from those warmup periods most historically comparable to this one.
The last pair of springs during which the Mets were technically defending a National League flag indicated the Mets didn’t want to be reminded of their recent successes. There was, as Ira Berkow noted [6], a lot of “putting that behind them” for the 1987 Mets, as if somebody wouldn’t want to mistakenly stumble into 108 wins two years in a row. Fourteen Februarys later, as the inimitable Lisa Olson put it [7], “the ‘what ifs?’ turned into ‘what nows?’” The vibe out of the East Coast of Florida in 2001 — unlike the buzz that permeates the first baseball days of 2016 — didn’t resonate with determination regarding completion of unfinished business.
Back in the present, on the other side of the Sunshine State, Niese, who now receives his springtime mail in Bradenton, recounted where his 2015 went awry. He told a Pittsburgh reporter [8] on Wednesday that he chose the wrong night to pitch on one occasion…an enormous occasion in his and his family’s life. Nobody begrudges him his inability to multitask last July 24 [9]. Nobody with an iota of humanity begrudged him then. The birth of a child is no fleeting distraction.
Whether it derailed the remainder of his season is questionable. Only Niese, since traded for Neil Walker, knows what worked for him and what conspired to betray him. In the same interview with the Post-Gazette, he added that the occasional forays into a six-man rotation bugged him as well. He’s not alone among Met pitchers who chafed at not throwing as often as he preferred, but he is the only one pointing to it as a cause for his personally falling short in the aftermath of a team triumph.
He’s also the only one among those who were regular starters for the 2015 Mets to be on another team and therefore not answering questions about what it will be like trying to get back to the World Series.
One Met performs badly at a crucial moment, takes responsibility for it and is ready to try to win another pennant. One Met performs inconsistently in general, offers a couple of possible explanations — neither of which was as simple as “no excuses” — and we have a pretty solid second baseman to show for it.
***
We join the rest of the baseball world in mourning the sudden passing of Tony Phillips [10], dead of a heart attack at the ridiculously young age of 56. Phillips competed fiercely in the majors for parts of eighteen seasons, stopping off at Shea for two months in 1998 to lend a veteran hand to a playoff push that came up a game or so shy of a Wild Card. He gave the Mets one particularly memorable home run in early September and me a thrill that feels wonderful to remember [11] to this day.