I happened to be standing when Yoenis Cespedes [1] hit his tide-turning home run in the seventh inning Tuesday night, though I didn’t remain standing for long. In the instant it departed Great American Ball Park, I jumped up and — by necessity of gravity — down. I believe it was just one jump, but one jump is one more than the Mets had elicited from me previously in all of 2016.
This is a very different year now, of course. It’s a year when jumping up seems de rigueur. The Mets have been on a steady jump upward for approximately two-and-a-half weeks, elevating from the depths of about to fall out of it to the cusp of heights unknown. It’s a good direction to be heading in. May it continue.
The prior portion of the season, one underscored internally and externally by moaning and kvetching, felt very familiar. It was the theme of the years directly in front of 2015, to say nothing of an endlessly aggravating chunk of frustration embedded inside 2015. By late May of 2016, the groaning instinct had returned in full force. It was an appropriate response to a season in which as little as possible was going right. We situationally mock and dismiss the team we permanently embrace as a defense mechanism. It’s the emotional equivalent of putting on a shift.
Definitive statements where the Mets and their trajectories are concerned strike me as useless. It’s baseball. Baseball is subject to change. Thus, by late August of 2016, a different instinct began to take hold. Pure, unabated affection for an entity we always loved conceptually but were now licensed to actively adore. Sometimes there’s much to be said for being a weathervane. There’s nothing wrong with knowing which way the wind is blowing and taking it from there. Sometimes you just want a reminder that the entity you love is capable of reminding you what love is. Thirteen wins in seventeen games at the most critical time of the year is an effective reminder.
It’s the circle of life, you might say. It moves us all through despair and hope.
Just as I knew how to be disgusted and disappointed by the team that plunged from 47-38 to 60-62, Tuesday night’s Cespedes-fueled 5-3 victory over the Reds and its attendant rise to 73-66 (closing in on one or both of the Wild Cards, despite the respective unhelpful tendencies of the Pirates and Rockies displayed versus the Cardinals and Giants) provided me an easy cue of how to feel when my baseball team comes through for me. Technically they come through for themselves and I watch, but let’s not pick apart their motivations. We’re fans. We process as we see fit.
The Mets fit in this playoff chase. They have Cespedes, and Cespedes shapes the moment as well as any Met who’s ever been capable of levitating me six inches off the ground with one swing of the bat or one cannon of a throw. Yoenis delivered on offense and defense like UPS’s September Employee of the Month. The home run — his 28th of 2016 and his sixth since simultaneously returning from the DL and instigating this playoff chase for real — left the park in the seventh but appeared to land in the ninth. Yo doesn’t hit too many that leave doubt. Who could doubt the Mets would prevail when Ces took them from behind, 3-2, and catapulted them ahead, 4-3?
Except it was only the seventh, and that sense of “we can’t lose” is probably the most self-defeating of all. The seventh isn’t the ninth. The Reds, despite their recent accommodating ways where we’re concerned, were still capable of coming back themselves. Brandon Phillips [2], who usually does his killing of us at Citi Field (plus in the offseason when he’s rejecting trades to Washington, compelling the Nationals to scrounge about for a less appealing second baseman), positioned himself to break or at least scratch our hearts when he doubled to the left field wall with two out in the eighth.
Or he would have been had it actually been the double it appeared to be before Yoenis got his arm on the ball. Normally you’d say “his hands,” but Cespedes’s right arm should get the credit for the no-hop throw he delivered to Kelly Johnson [3] to easily nail Phillips at second and generate the vital third out of the eighth inning. It kept the score 4-3, it sucked the night’s life out of Cincinnati, and it all but sealed what became a 5-3 win [4]. Three outs in the ninth still had to be secured, but after the multifaceted Cespedes Show — with key supporting roles filled by the likes of Reyes, Granderson, De Aza, Salas, Reed and Familia — it was almost impossible to imagine a horrible ending.
With Yo on board, you can imagine anything wonderful. He is what Special Sauce is to the Big Mac, what Chemical X is to the Powerpuff Girls, what heaping helpings of Strawberry and Piazza once were to predecessor Mets, except the vital element of La Potencia is potentially more potent even while simultaneously seeming somehow less stable. In his eighth active month as a Met, there remains an air of mystery to Cespedes. He speaks only through an interpreter, and then primarily platitudinally. His long-term contractual status is forever unsettled. He’s inevitably one physical misstep from incapacitation. He doesn’t run hard until he switches gears and runs harder than everybody. He looks awful on outside pitches until absolutely murdering the low strike he likes. He’s indifferent in the outfield except when he’s taking your breath away. He comes across as vaguely distant. He comes across as the happiest guy in town. He golfs and smokes, one or both of which are bad for him, but if it prepares and relaxes him for hitting and throwing, who are we to say?
When he is larger than the circle of life he approaches the plate to at home [5] and has games like he had Tuesday at Cincinnati and is on the roll he’s been mostly on since August 20, he is as spectacular a Met as you could ever ask for. It wouldn’t have even occurred to us to ask for him. We’re Mets fans. Since when do we have a Yoenis Cespedes to jump up and down over?