Imagine being Sam Coonrod [1].
You go to spring training with a loaded team being talked up as bound for the World Series. You’re being talked up as a prospective member of said team’s bullpen. It’s got to be exciting.
But you don’t get out of March before being felled by a strained lat. The team goes north without you. All you can do is work on your rehab, hoping to heal up. Maybe, you think, you can be ready to go by the time summer’s ending. If so, all is not lost — that’ll be just as the postseason is coming into view.
Coonrod finally arrived Monday night, but these days when people around the Mets talk about the postseason, the logical next question is to ask which year is being discussed. He found a lineup featuring Rafael Ortega [2] and Jonathan Arauz [3]. He came into the game following a two-inning stint by Tyson Miller [4], who was making his own Mets debut. He handed the ball over to Phil Bickford [5], who passed the baton to Trevor Gott [6].
Miller to Coonrod to Bickford to Gott. Ortega and Arauz. Yep, just like we planned it.
And yet here’s the Because Baseball part. Those four relievers covered five innings as a bridge between a shaky Carlos Carrasco [7] and Adam Ottavino [8], walking a less than ideal four Pirates but allowing a very serviceable lone hit and an as-desired zero runs. Miller got the win in his maiden Met voyage. Arauz clubbed a homer and chipped in some flashy defense at second. Ortega, key to Sunday’s salvage win [9] against the Braves, stole a base.
It was enough to down the Pirates and give the Mets a second straight win [10], one in which they scored runs in the first six innings, something they hadn’t done in a home game since 1987, when Citi Field was just the vaguest of what-ifs.
It’s a reminder that ballplayers we disdain as waiver-wire chum and Quad-A Plan Es/Fs are still world-class athletes, whose only failing is being among the 1,000 best baseball players on the planet instead of the best 800. And it’s a reminder that even baseball played in garbage time because it has to be can yield little pleasures and little victories.
I bet Sam Coonrod’s happy — as well as Miller and Arauz. Whatever the standings say, they’re allowed to be. And you know what? So are we.