Here's another reason baseball is a great game. An objective pre-reason forecast for the Mets offered little hope. The Queens contingent was drinking from a nearly empty pitching cup and sported Band-Aids all over the field.
It's a long season and the prediction may yet turn out right, but for now, the Mets are 10 games over and knocking on the door of first. How did a squad with a flashing check engine light manage to lap the field for two weeks?
Well, R.A. Dickey is 5-0, 2.82. It's no knock against the early prognostications that none of them accounted for Dickey. He was neither a Met nor an asset before the season began.
Non-prospect Ike Davis, whose pedigree included half a year at Double-A prior to 2010, has banished the ghost of Carlos Delgado at first base. Pre-season reviews missed that. So sue them.
Mike Pelfrey dipped into 2009's 10-12, 5.03 performance and pulled out a 9-1, 2.39 exhibition so far in 2010. Whoops. Didn't have that.
Jonathan Niese was certainly on the early spring radar screen, but bets on rookies always have to be hedged, right Matt Wieters?
The Grapefruit League roster included train wrecks Oliver Perez, Elmer Dessens and Gary Matthews, Jr. After a few painful looks, Jerry Manuel has minimized their participation. D'Oh! Couldn't have predicted that.
In short, the Mets today aren't the team that broke camp in April. Nor, likely, are most others. The only constant in baseball is inconsistency, which makes pre-season predictions largely academic exercises.
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Word was floating around, as the Pirates sunk in the NL Central like Blackbeard in cement shoes, that manager John Russell and GM Neal Huntington would be jettisoned because of the team's poor performance. Anyone who believed (or reported) this needs a psych eval.
Neither Russell nor Huntington is being paid to break Pittsburgh's string of futility this year. They inherited a patient with strep throat, a broken leg, a bleeding ulcer, elbow tendinitis, diabetes, an ingrown toenail and bilateral plantar fasciitis. Their charge will require time, tender care and lots of patience before he recovers, and any attempt to send him home prematurely will delay his ultimate recovery.
Management in the Steel City gets this and recently revealed that contracts for Russell and Huntington had been extended through next year. There will be a reckoning for this administration, but it's not now. So stop looking at the Pirates' box score unless you've got the 2012 newspaper.
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Reports, including mine, of the baseball death of David Ortiz have been greatly exaggerated. I revert to my original projection for Ortiz: he will be a diminishing asset, but an asset nonetheless this year.
No really, that's what I said.
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