Week to Week

Brandon Nimmo is “week to week” with whatever he did to his right knee and ankle this past Friday night in yet another game that counted only as much you wish it to. The Mets termed it a low-grade sprain. Nimmo, newly signed for eight years, isn’t interested in timetables or diagnoses that indicate anything less than “leading off and playing center field, number nine, Brandon Nimmo” will echo throughout formerly Marlins Park on Thursday March 30 and everywhere else clear to the end of 2030. He’s got “a best-case scenario” going for him, he’s convinced, despite the slide into second that had him limping off the field and all of us dragging a hand down our collective face following the second OMG/WTF moment in about 48 hours. He’s respectfully dismissing the company line Billy Eppler delivered and is instead taking it “day to day,” insisting he felt better Sunday than he did Saturday. He’s consulting with his “heart of hearts” and believing he’ll be “ready for Opening Day,” or at least is “not ruling anything out right now”.

Grin and bear another injury.

For such conditional silver lining mining of the clouds over Port St. Lucie, pending, of course, what the doctors have to say on the matter, Brandon Nimmo is my co-player of the year before it begins, sharing never-too-soon honors with Edwin Diaz, who told Eppler in the dark hour the Mets weren’t expecting to arrive on March 15, “Don’t worry. This is going to be fine.” Once the year begins, we’ll start fresh, but that type of attitude registers as a welcome antidote to whatever the rest of us are thinking every time anything befalls a Met…or any time anything might possibly befall a Met. When it was reported in passing on social media over the weekend that Max Scherzer would be hosting a “crawfish boil” for his teammates (I put the event in quotes lest you think I have any idea what a crawfish boil is), I’d say approximately every third Mets fan comment posted in response veered to wondering how many starts Scherzer would miss from burning his tongue on main dish.

Is March a little too early for Pessimism, Skepticism, Cynicism and Fatalism — the Four Horsemen of the Metspocalyspe — to be out and about? With Steve Cohen sending a veritable TLC staff to Diaz’s house to make sure his recovery proceeds apace and, more to the point, capable of doing and willing to do whatever it takes to not let a couple of injuries to a couple of crucial players derail the projected Mets Express? With shreds of evidence suggesting maybe Edwin won’t necessarily be out all of 2023? Perhaps it’s just the painkillers talking when “a person close to Diaz” tells The Athletic, “There is some optimism” on behalf of Edwin’s surgically repaired patellar tendon (and the rest of Sugar) returning to action while there’s still some championship baseball to be contested. I wouldn’t take that to whichever gambling consortium will be carpetbombing its commercials all over Mets telecasts, but it’s a pleasant enough thought. You lose Diaz for the foreseeable future, and Nimmo for an unspecified number of weeks, and Quintana to a tough break that will have him out several months, and whoever else has already been sidelined or will be sidelined in the course of Metsian events, you welcome coming up with whatever it takes to fend off Pessimism, Skepticism, Cynicism and Fatalism. It’s probably the last two that had Scherzer getting too close to the boiling crawfish.

Nimmo, it should be noted, sustained his injury in a Spring Training game. There was no celebrating, just kind of a crummy slide. Yet he and Diaz are both out for a spell or more. Quintana had a lesion on his rib. Sorry it was there. Glad they found it. Thrilled it was benign. All kinds of hell will appear at every turn for a baseball player and a baseball team preparing for the season ahead. Sometimes you’re luckier than hell. Pete Alonso had a serious car accident on his way to camp last March. “A close experience with death,” he called it then. He walked away physically unscathed. Sometimes you catch a break despite another driver running a red light. Sometimes you tear a patellar tendon because somebody’s happy you won what you consider a big game. Sometimes you’re just trying to get from first to second. Never mind bubble wrap. Let’s ask Cohen to get us the best possible players and simply put them on display in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda for us to admire, relatively certain nothing terrible will happen to them if they promise to not budge. The second anybody begins to move a muscle is when we brace for the worst.

That strain of anxiety stems from a shall we say checkered past that ran, then limped through last week. This week we go on. Next week the season starts, without Diaz, without Quintana, probably without Nimmo, Brandon’s heart of hearts notwithstanding. All the Mets won’t be ready to go, though there will be a full complement of Mets, a few unexpected when we began shaping expectations about this year, but that will happen (which is why preseason expectations are best formed out of the most malleable clay available). I hope to unconditionally release those Four Horsemen of the Metspocalypse from of our system by Opening Day, or at least reassign them to crawfish cleanup duty at Max’s place.