Baseball fans are worriers. They are complainers and kvetchers, they are forever looking for the other spike to drop, they are always on the lookout for curses, jinxes, poxes and hexes. They are skeptics and cynics and critics. They are hard to please, harder still to satisfy.
And yet …
As the 2017 baseball season dawns in New York City …
There is an awful lot of optimism swirling about.
Mets fans feel good about their team, and rightly so, what with all that pitching, with a lineup that should be strong enough and deep enough to avoid the brown-outs that have plagued them the past two years. Yankees fans feel good about the direction their team is going, and have seen just enough from a spring training in which the team has won just about every day to dream about speeding up the process.
This doesn’t mean the dark clouds have all vanished, of course. All it will take is for one of the Mets’ starting pitchers to see his velocity dip a few miles per hour; all it will take is for Gary Sanchez or Greg Bird to suffer through an early 3-for-30 slump, and we’ll all be back in our comfort zone as baseball fans, convinced the baseball world is lined up against us, no matter which side of the street we hang our hats.
But that’s for later on.
For now, there is the Yankees opening up in St. Petersburg, Fla., Sunday afternoon against the Rays. There is the Mets opening up in Citi Field on Monday afternoon against the Braves. There is all that pitching for the Mets, all that young hitting for the Yankees. There is, indisputably, more shared optimism than at any time in the teams’ shared history in New York.
Jose Reyes hugs Yoenis Cespedes after a Mets win at Citi Field.Charles Wenzelberg
“I like where we are and I like what I’ve seen,” Mets manager Terry Collins said a few weeks ago. Collins has been through enough rodeos to know you have to be careful about getting too far ahead of yourself in February and March. Still: “All you ask as a manager is to have a team that allows you to compete every day, gives you a chance to win every day. And I think we have that.”
Joe Girardi? The Yankees manager isn’t exactly generous with his feelings most days, but even he has had a hard time camouflaging the obvious excitement he harbors watching this team (even if you can also tell he has regular night sweats pondering his pitching rotation, as well he should, because that’s the one thing that could make a happily-ever-after season virtually impossible).
“The one thing that I’ve realized in camp is that the depth of our young players is bigger than I realized,” Girardi said earlier in the spring. “It’s been better than what I heard. I wanted to see it with my own two eyes, I didn’t realize how deep it really was.”
So, Joe: Do you believe the Yankees really make the playoffs?
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
This is a rare dynamic in our town. The Yankees and Mets shared the city for 23 years before enjoying a season in which both of them emerged as legitimate contenders: in 1985, the Yankees won 97 games and the Mets won 98 and neither team was eliminated until the last week of the season.
During the Yankees’ dynastic years, the Mets emerged as a feisty, scrappy foil, the teams finally squaring off in the 2000 World Series after the Mets had fallen two games shy of that plateau a year earlier. There still have been just four seasons when both teams made the playoffs (1999, 2000, 2006, 2017) in the past 22 years. And the Mets will be trying to do something they’ve never done, qualify for the postseason for three straight seasons.
Lots of possibilities afoot. Lots of positive thoughts.
“If I’m a baseball fan,” Collins said, “then I can’t wait for the season to get started.”
If you’re a baseball fan, especially in New York, there’s never been a spring quite like this one, flush with anticipation, flusher with hope. Let’s get this started. Let’s get going. Come on.