I adored Entourage when it began airing in 2004. Then I tolerated it. Then I asked myself why I was still watching it. Then I rooted for it to go away, yet stuck with it to the bitter end in 2011 because I can be that way. My gripe with the HBO series that ran for eight loooong seasons was that whatever predicament Vincent Chase and his boys would get into, there was always some magic solution that rescued them. The worst of it (at least through Season Four) was the episode when Vince’s crew had to get to Cannes and implacable forces conspired against their travel plans. They were stuck. There was no way they were flying.
Then Kanye West shows up at LAX with his amply spacious private plane, invites them aboard and ferries them hassle-free to France. Hey, look — everything worked out fine again!
How freaking ridiculous is that? You can’t expect your problems to be solved every time by some larger-than-life superstar conveniently ambling by with an enormous problem-solving vessel.
Unless you’re a Mets fan.
Yoenis Cespedes [1] and his bat take care of everything, don’t they? Yo comes back from six weeks of major league inactivity, he barely plays any rehab games, he lets it be known his legs aren’t really fully ready for everyday action…and he hits a ninth-inning grand slam to put a tenuous doubleheader opener definitively out of reach [2].
How could that possibly happen so easily? Because he’s Yo, that’s why. Because he’s Yo and he took a very Yo swing and deposited a very Yo home run over the SunTrust fence. In that instant against Atlanta, he became the plot point to end all plot points. You can be picky about whether he was actually the game changer — the Mets were winning, 2-1, when he took Luke Jackson [3] into the clouds — but I know he’s a blog changer. I was gonna write about how good Robert Gsellman [4] (6.2 IP, 3 H, 2 BB, 0 R) and Wilmer Flores [5] (2-for-4, run scored, run batted in, nice grab at first) looked, how horrifying Asdrubal Cabrera [6] (two errors in the first inning) and Fernando Salas [7] (a home run surrendered to Brandon Phillips [8] on the second pitch he threw) were, and whatever else was about to go right or wrong across a tense Saturday afternoon.
But, nah. I’m just gonna get on Yo’s plane and enjoy the very sweet ride.