Was Wednesday afternoon’s matinee a perfect baseball game?
Probably not — if you have to ask you have your own answer — but it was sure an enjoyable one, with a spectacular performance from Jacob deGrom [1], signs of professional life from Jose Reyes [2], a terrific day from Wilmer Flores [3], and a heckuva dragon to slay in a suddenly scarily revitalized Giancarlo Stanton [4].
Flores wound up starting at third, with Reyes shifted to short, because Asdrubal Cabrera [5] was a late scratch with a family illness he’d had to attend to. And Flores came out on a mission to show he shouldn’t be on the bench.
I’m a fan of Terry Collins [6]‘s — I think he’s a great teacher of young players, a terrific motivator in the clubhouse, and I admire that he’s changed at an age far past when most of us are capable of change. Remember how Terry was going to be a disaster because he was so high-strung and had alienated the Angels and Astros? If anything, the complaints about him in New York have been that he’s been too laid back dealing with players. He knew he couldn’t manage players the way he had, consciously set out to do things differently, and stuck to it.
A preamble like that is a good sign that a “but” is coming, of course, and here it is: I think Terry overvalues veterans in the lineup and that’s hurt the development of young players who need playing time above all else.
I think Michael Conforto [7] would have been just fine if he’d kept playing every day, but Terry insisted on sitting him against lefties, based on a) a need to get Juan Lagares [8] at-bats and b) the idea that Conforto, solely because he’s a young left-handed hitter, couldn’t hit lefties. The first point is certainly defensible and part of the tough job of a manager; a look at Conforto’s .274 line against lefties in the minors over 180 plate appearances should establish that the second point is fiction. In May Conforto got repeatedly yanked out of the lineup against lefties; denied regular playing time he got understandably anxious and started lunging at balls, was unlucky enough to roll into some lousy BABIP, and suddenly we had a Just So Story about confidence, a nebulous wrist injury and a trip to Vegas.
(By the way, I’m indebted for the above to Joe Sheehan, whose newletter I highly recommend [9] for thoughts about baseball that will challenge you to reassess what you think and what you think you know.)
Wilmer Flores was the protagonist of a wonderful story last year, putting together a pretty good season despite treatment that came uncomfortably close to professional abuse from his ballclub. This year he found himself on the bench, and was on the disabled list with a .255 average when David Wright [10]‘s neck betrayed him and his season ended.
With Wright down, Flores started on May 29 and went 1 for 10; since then, he’s hitting .313 with six homers and 19 RBI. Collins likes to talk about guys doing better when they hear footsteps, but I think that’s another Just So Story. The much simpler answer, and the one that strikes me as the likelier answer, is Flores has played well because he’s been allowed to play every day.
Which he now won’t be able to do [11], never mind his two-homer heroics and nifty plays in the field.
It’s far from clear to me that Reyes has any business starting over Flores — his only incontestable advantage in that matchup is speed. Yet that seems to be Terry Collins’s working assumption, and I think it’s a bad one.
The Mets owe Reyes nothing — it’s the other way around, given that they’ve tossed him a professional and personal lifeline. The competition here shouldn’t be between Wilmer Flores and the memory of what Jose Reyes was during Obama’s first term; it should be between Wilmer Flores and a 33-year-old with reduced speed who’s playing out of position and making the league minimum. But I fear we won’t get that, because Wilmer Flores is Wilmer Flores and Jose Reyes is a Proven Veteran™.
But back to the game. It really was fun [12]!
Can we agree that Stanton is terrifying? Change him out of horrid Marlins motley and into classical garb and he’d make an excellent Ares or a clean-shaven Hercules — heck, he already looks like a statue, with his stone face and his dark eyes like cold glass. The man does terrible things to baseballs — his two homers off deGrom were both line drives that he essentially hit only with his arms, whipping them into distant regions with such velocity that the outfielders barely budged. The scouting report on Stanton ought to be the same as a previous generation’s for Hank Aaron [13]: hope nobody’s on base when he hits one.
With the more-than-forgiveable exception of Stanton, though, deGrom was on point, outfoxing the Marlins with strategic use of his change-up (like the beauty that got Christian Yelich [14] in the third) and coaxing double plays when he needed them. We got Flores’s heroics, and a couple of balls over third from Reyes that once might have been triples when he had another gear but were perfectly welcome doubles without that gear, and a nice game from Curtis Granderson [15], playing in obvious discomfort as evidenced by the aftermath of his sliding grab to rob Marcell Ozuna [16] in the sixth.
Stanton wasn’t the last out of the game — that distinction went to Ichiro Suzuki [17], who came up as the tying run but hit into a double play. But the game’s climax, for me, was the ninth-inning confrontation between Stanton and Jeurys Familia [18].
Stanton deserves every superlative you can dream up, but Familia’s pretty damn good too. He went after Stanton with his usual weapon in the usual spot, that sinker on the knee that drops down towards the ankle. You knew he was going to do it and I knew he was going to do it and Stanton knew he was going to do it, but much like Mariano Rivera [19] and his cutter it didn’t matter — that pitch was only going to fail if the execution faltered.
Still, it’s Stanton. That pitch alone wasn’t going to get him out, the way it carved up the Cubs. So Familia paired it with a slider on the other side of the plate, dropping into the dirt. Stanton knew he was going to do that, too — the key was when. Familia got Stanton to foul off a sinker on 1-2 and then went to the slider, which Stanton let go for ball two. Then back to that sinker, which Stanton fouled off once and then again, his mind and body getting more fixated on neutralizing it even as he knew another slider was lurking out there.
It came on the eighth pitch, skipping into the dirt in front of home plate, and Stanton lunged for it — lunged for it and missed. Wonderful.