The Feelers on Wheeler

When they’re tired of a player, fans have been known to opine that they’ll drive him to the airport themselves. I’ve certainly said it a few times. Heck, I’ll give Jose Reyes a piggyback ride to LaGuardia if that will end the current farce. But what we don’t hear often enough is the opposite sentiment — a promise, say, to lie down on the runway if the Mets try to get rid of someone rumored to be on the move.

Someone like Zack Wheeler.

Wheeler has attracted plenty of scouts and rumors ahead of the trading deadline, and on Sunday he showed why he’s a hot commodity, scattering five hits and a walk over six innings. Which doesn’t capture how dominant he was: he was throwing strikes and working quickly and aggressively all day. Know how many times a Pirate saw a 2-0, 2-1, 3-0 or 3-1 count from Wheeler on Sunday?

Zero. That’s good.

The Mets being the Mets, they went out and backed Wheeler up with another zero: no offense, for which some credit should go to hulking hurler Joe Musgrove, who was pretty awesome himself as Wheeler’s opposite number. So Wheeler took care of things himself, burying a fifth-inning fastball that got too much plate in the right-field corner to chase Luis Guillorme home from first.

Wheeler departed after six on the right side of a skinny 1-0 lead, but Seth Lugo rebounded from Friday’s lousy outing to hold the fort, helped out by a good throw by Kevin Plawecki, whom I’d just taken to Twitter to declare myself officially sick of, and perhaps even willing to drive to the airport myself. (No piggyback rides, though — not for backup catchers.) With one out in the eighth, Starling Marte tried to steal first and was cut down by Plawecki, an erasure that held up under replay scrutiny and seemed to take the sap out of Gregory Polanco, who’d tormented us all series. Polanco, deprived of a runner in scoring position, swung at a ball out of the strike zone and was done.

That left the ninth in the hands of Anthony Swarzak and his train wreck of a season. But of late Swarzak’s been more like the pitcher the Mets thought enough of to give a two-year contract. He buzzed through the Pirates 1-2-3, and Wheeler’s 1-0 victory was secured.

If you’re scoring at home and have been for the last 49 years, you knew immediately that was the sixth time a Met pitcher had driven in the lone run in their own 1-0 win: the others to have done it are Jerry Koosman, Don Cardwell, Buzz Capra, Ray Sadecki and Nino Espinosa, with Koosman and Cardwell inflicting said indignity on these same Pirates (or, OK, on utterly different Pirates) in their respective portions of a Sept. 12, 1969 doubleheader. I remember that Koosman/Cardwell factoid from all the Miracle Mets insta-paperbacks I devoured as a kid; you know some veteran fan somewhere in Pittsburgh remembered it too on Sunday and went off, muttering, to clean out an already immaculate garage.

Anyway, Wheeler’s been good for some time, winning his last three starts to go to 5-6 — the sign of ace stuff in this Mets rotation. After losing two years to injury and one to accumulated rust, he looks like he’s figured out who he is, what he can do, and how he can do it consistently. Maybe it’s just my stubborn optimism at work again, but that strikes me as the kind of thing to build around rather than trade away.

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Addendum: I’ll be at Tuesday night’s Mets-Nats game in D.C., and then seeing five more big-league games live over the next 10 days, part of a ballpark trip that will take me to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, both Chicago stadiums and Cincinnati. Will it be awesome, or the baseball equivalent of an ice-cream headache? Stay tuned!