Only Yesterday

Steven Matz made his debut for the Mets in June 2015, pitching against the Reds. It didn’t start out ideally — the young lefty from Long Island surrendered a home run to the first batter he faced in the big leagues, Brandon Phillips — but it soon got better. A lot better: Matz doubled in his first big-league plate appearance, grabbing a 2-1 lead for himself, and collected hits his other two times up, including a two-run single that put distance between the Mets and the Reds. Meanwhile, the enthusiastic reactions from his grandfather, Bert Moller, created an instant folk hero.

Matz won, we were all beside ourselves, and why not? Here was a lefty power pitcher with a wipeout arsenal, and as a bonus he apparently could hit, too. And his story was straight out of central casting: a kid from Stony Brook who’d lost two years to Tommy John surgery before throwing a professional pitch, finally getting to make good. Heck, Grandpa Bert had even been a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan.

Honestly, it was perfect.

These are the scenarios the baseball gods concoct to toy with us.

Matz had some very good stretches for the Mets, and did an enormous amount of work for local charities. He also spent a lot of time on the shelf, bedeviled by a run of injuries and surgeries. And there were long runs during which he was on the mound but shy of his vast potential, often struggling to shake off bad luck or teammates’ misplays.

Matz went from prospect to suspect, from bright young thing to question mark. He even got usurped as Local Boy Makes Good, yielding that status to Marcus Stroman, a schoolboy rival from Matz’s high-school days. Then it all came apart in the pandemic season: Matz looked utterly lost, was removed from the Mets’ less-than-stellar starting rotation, and wound up with a 9.68 ERA in nine games. It was over — in January, the Mets traded him to Toronto for Sean Reid-Foley, Yennsy Diaz and Josh Winckowski. You’re familiar with the first two but might have forgotten about Winckowski, who went to Boston in the three-team deal that brought Khalil Lee to the Mets. Meanwhile, Matz’s Blue Jays career has been a lot like his time in New York: He looked rejuvenated in winning his first four starts but has sort of bumped along since then, mixing good starts with bad.

On Friday night Matz returned to New York and Citi Field, and what followed was something you almost never get: a perfectly calibrated return for an enemy player.

Matz surrendered a two-run bomb to Pete Alonso in the first inning, then gave up nothing else the rest of the way, departing in the sixth with five Ks and that Mets’ 2-0 lead intact. He got the pomp and circumstance reserved for favored sons — tribute video entering, warm ovation exiting. Matz tipped his cap coming and going, something pitchers now largely neglect to do despite the game having become far more demonstrative.

That’s the formula, isn’t it? The guy who used to be our guy but no longer is does well against us … but not well enough. He gets to say nice postgame things leavened with regret about the score; we get to offer up applause that doesn’t sound sarcastic, pitying or grudging.

On the other side of the ball was Tylor Megill, a California kid who arrived in near-total anonymity and has quickly evolved into a mainstay of the starting rotation, which could be faint praise but isn’t. Megill’s shown better stuff than his scouting report promised and a veteran’s even keel, but those things hadn’t translated to a major-league win — to cite an obsolete but stubbornly resonant stat — until Friday. He even got his first hit, though it wasn’t greeted with Grandpa Bert levels of rapture.

The Mets remain cautious in navigating Megill’s third trip through an order — a particularly good idea against the Blue Jays and their murderers’ row of next-generation sluggers. Megill handled them with aplomb and got some help from his defense — an airborne Michael Conforto, a pirouetting J.D. Davis, an alertly scrambling Luis Guillorme. He gave way to Seth Lugo, Trevor May and finally Edwin Diaz, who gave up hard contact but no hits to secure the game.

(Necessary assistance: a second bomb from Alonso, ushered out with entertaining calls on TV and radio. On the radio side, Howie Rose marveled that “this ball’s in orbit!”; on TV, Ron Darling let out a startled, admiring “uh-oh” as the ball rocketed skyward. Oh, and the Mets now have a stuffed horse for home-run celebrations — not quite the Padres’ swag chain, but an amusing addition.)

Players come, players go — that’s the way baseball always has been and always will be. Rookies become veterans in a blink and in another blink they’ve turned into visiting alumni saying a few words on the broadcast. Local heroes wind up with jobs that need passports; newcomers assume their roles and claim our affections. That can be painful, it can be celebratory, it can be a little of both. Either way, it happens, and the participants wind up knit together in all-time rosters and statistical tables, in team lore and most of all in our memories.