I admittedly know nothing about ranching, but if ranches are prone to wild boar attacks, then I can’t really blame Yoenis Cespedes for taking steps to prevent a wild boar from attacking him on his ranch. And if a wild boar winds up breaking free of the trap set by the proprietor of stately La Potencia Ranch [1] of Vero Beach, Fla., I also can’t blame Cespedes for trying to avoid the wild boar, as he apparently attempted…and if Yoenis’s defensive action here was less effective than the kind that won him a Gold Glove for his work in Detroit, and it resulted in him fracturing an ankle by falling into a hole…well, I’m sorry he got hurt more than he already was from double heel surgery — and I’m glad he didn’t get hurt worse.
All that said, geez, what an (ahem) unusual story [2] the Post reported Friday night. It was already out of leftfield that the left fielder’s insanely large-in-hindsight contract was slashed [3] to merely ludicrously large-in-hindsight. That basically never happens in baseball, but the Mets got back many of the millions upon millions they were supposed to be paying Cespedes, since Cespedes was supposed to be not letting wild boars get in the way of him trying to play baseball again relatively soon. Or something like that. When we heard that Cespedes’s deal was reduced like Cespedes’s gear was in the Mets’ team store once “La Potencia” definitively rhymed with “in absentia,” we more or less figured it had something to do with the what-else-is-new? [4] news that Yo took a spill into a hole on his ranch. But we didn’t know exactly what that bit of business was about when it was revealed last May.
Now we do. It was about Yoenis Cespedes trying to stay on peaceful terms with a heretofore trapped wild boar who wasn’t crazy about having been trapped. It could happen to anybody.
Anybody on the Mets, especially.