Tidings at the Ides

What Met tidings do the ides of March bring this spring? I’d like to believe glad, though in the middle a month devoted to merely getting ready for the season ahead, who can tell?

Two sentences, two question marks. Only in March? Always in March.

Entering the action of March 15, which includes a game matching Met prospects versus National prospects — ideal when everything is about waiting and seeing, and seeing and waiting — the Mets’ record this Spring is 9-8-1. I’ll take that to mean everything is going along as it should. No more than half of any game to this point in Grapefruit League play is designed to replicate the games played from Opening Day forward. Some regulars charge onto the exhibition field in February, others wait until early March to as much as cross a foul line (while still others wait out a lingering biceps issue amid assurances that it’s no big deal). Established regulars ready themselves at their own pace. Those fighting for recognition either open eyes by taking advantage of their opportunity or get a temporary pass for their statistical setbacks because, c’mon, it’s only Spring. The lineups that look legitimate in the top of the first are a hodgepodge of All Others no later than the seventh.

Our Spring Training as fans took hold many Springs ago. We are trained to understand little of what we might be tuning in for matters in cobbling a throughline to, this year, March 28. If the Mets were winning all these games that don’t count, I’d be a little nervous. If the Mets were losing all these games that don’t count, I’d be verging on apoplectic. Instead, the Mets are not too hot, not too cold; we’re Team Just Right. Met defense — now known as run prevention — seems to be in sync to date with our not bad, could be better, don’t take it too seriously yet motif.

Still, you have to like that Met starting pitching, whose Senga-deprived composition seems an advertisement for hoping to get the most out of what adequacy you have, has mostly quelled opponents’ starting hitting, whoever composes it in a given inning. The perennial bromide of the pitchers being ahead of the hitters is a handy touchstone for reminding us how Spring Training operates. The Met pitchers being very far ahead of the Met hitters, however…ah, it’s Spring, you tell yourself. I’ve noticed not a lot of runs being driven in or scored by either the fellows whose names are a little hard to read (thanks, Nike/Fanatics/MLB) or the fellows who have yet to rate names on their backs (who doesn’t love when No. 97 is at bat and a different No. 97 is on deck?). This, too, shall pass, or we shall hope it does, especially if the front office continues to pass on the professional hitters still available on the surprisingly open market.

I’m also generating preliminary faith in the coalescing 2024 Mets bullpen, an instinct that courts danger, because, you know, Mets bullpens. Nevertheless, many of the guys who crept into the transaction column on little cat feet are hinting that they and their array of different looks are capable of building the bridge from however much the adequate starting pitching can construct to the ninth inning. To engineer truly meaningful ninth innings, the offense and defense will have to drive in and prevent runs, respectively. Let’s hope they do, because if we get the ninths we desire, we’ll get Edwin Diaz.

One glad tiding above all has permeated my Spring consciousness, and that was the return earlier this week of Diaz. It wasn’t the ninth, because it’s never the ninth for a closer when a closer is just feeling his way into Spring, but never mind the inning. It was Edwin coming to pitch in a game for the first time since the World Baseball Classic just about a year earlier, and we all remember the postscript to that appearance.

Monday night in St. Lucie, it wasn’t so much the trumpets blaring for Edwin Diaz. It was that drumbeat that precedes the trumpets when you hear Sugar making his way to the mound. My Pavolovian response was to salivate, especially from my tear ducts. The whole “Narco” bit was a blast in 2022. In 2023, it morphed into nostalgia for the grand old days, à la watching grainy footage of Cleon Jones dropping to one knee ten years after 1969, or stumbling across video of a little roller up along first, convincing me in a season like 1993 that a season like 1986 actually happened. The idea of Edwin Diaz last year might have meant more to me than the reality of Edwin Diaz the year before. And he meant a lot the year before.

This is the new year, and we’ve got the old Diaz, based on one inning, three batters and three strikeouts, everything looking good, nobody indicating they feel anything but good. If that’s the lone highlight of this Spring, then the highlight reel is robust.

***This week has brought two other pieces of news to which it is difficult to apply the descriptor “glad”, but an upbeat spin is possible when you pull back and take in the bigger picture.

Darryl Strawberry suffered a heart attack Monday night. The part to be glad about is Darryl himself posted to social media, “I am so happy and honored to report that all is well,” with an Instagram photo from his hospital bed revealing a smiling Straw. Over the past several years, Darryl has channeled his celebrity into ministering. Whenever he’s asked about baseball, he swears it’s no longer close to being of utmost importance to him. Yet baseball must still mean something, as he was in Port St. Lucie earlier this Spring and he has expressed great enthusiasm about being back in Flushing at the beginning of June to see his No. 18 retired. Let’s be glad that Darryl is recovering and will have the chance to continue to do what means most to him…and that what he did as a Met will always mean a ton to us.

Jim McAndrew died at the age of 80 on Thursday. I’m eternally glad I grew up with Jim McAndrew in my pitching rotation. Say the name “Jim McAndrew” (or his hometown of Lost Nation, Iowa) to me, and I’m a kid again, feeling blessed that a talent like his informs the astonishing depth that skews my perception of what Met pitching should be for the rest of my rooting life. Thinking back on how good Jim McAndrew so often was in the shadows of Seaver and Koosman and Gentry and Ryan and Matlack, throwing less hard stuff while receiving less consistent opportunities, I realize that had Jim McAndrew come along in some later Met times, he would have gotten the ball every fifth day, and we would have been well off for it.

The Met heyday of McAndrew, a starter 110 times between 1968 and 1973, yielded some indelible highlights, none more transcendent than the eleven innings he threw on the evening of September 10, 1969. You read that right: eleven innings, all in the service of pitching the Mets into first place for the very first time. That was the “LOOK WHO’S NO. 1” night, when the tiring Cubs lost in the afternoon, and McAndrew gave up single runs to the Expos in the first and second innings of the opener of a twi-nighter at Shea before holding the fort like crazy into extras. The Mets would win in twelve, sweep the doubleheader, grip first place and never give it up.

The Mets selected Jim in their very first amateur draft class, the same June 1965 crop that yielded Nolan Ryan and Ken Boswell. Three summers later, McAndrew’s initiation into the National League stands historically as a quintessential exercise in perseverance. As a pitcher in 1968, a.k.a. The Year of the Pitcher, he wasn’t alone in being put on a run-support starvation diet, but what Jim had to endure represented a whole other level of asceticism. In his first four starts, he tossed 24.2 innings, kept his ERA to 1.82, and came away with an 0-4 record. The Mets scored literally nothing for him in each of his starts. To get himself into the win column, he had to outduel future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, 1-0. To get there again (following losses of 2-0 and 2-1), he had to top future Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins, 1-0.

As a rookie and into the prime of his career, Jim McAndrew proved he could pitch with anybody, whatever uniform they were wearing. In six seasons as a Met, he was part of a world champion once and a pennant-winner twice. In his post-playing days, he always showed up when the 1969 Mets were introduced en masse to take his well-deserved bow. In 2015, I’m told, he paid his way to Kansas City to cheer on the most recent National League Champion Mets. Fantasy campers have warm memories of the tips they received from Coach McAndrew. Save for a brief stint with San Diego, he was literally a lifetime Met.

“My arm was live and I was in a good groove,” is how Jim recalled his 1969 effectiveness for Stanley Cohen in A Magic Summer. If that’s not an image to make a Mets fan glad, I don’t know what is.