Dana Brand's Mets Fan Blog

What gives more pleasure than an honest-to-God rout?  We had everything.  They had nothing.  Beltran hit his two home runs, Reyes his home run and two-run double, Lo Duca, Alou, and Green all hit a bunch.  And John Maine is getting me to dream that he is the second coming of Seaver.  Like a true Met great, pitching a one-hitter.  No-hitters are vulgar.  Mets don’t do them. 

10-0.  Three games.  Three wins.  What more could one have asked from the opening series of the season?  What more can one ask of baseball than the vicarious sense of omnipotence that a game like this one can give you?  What hope!  What promise!  What a vision of happiness! 

Oh sure, it may not last.  But it sure looks good, doesn’t it?  Some starts of some seasons are so giddy and wonderful that they make it impossible for things to go wrong.  Maybe this season will be like that.  Maybe it won’t.  But they have me dreaming of one of the best seasons ever. 

Of course I’m happy about the first two games. You saw all the reasons why the Mets are likely to be great this year. You saw how they can score runs even when their best bats are still waking up. You saw wonderful things happen on the field and wonderful things happen at the top of the rotation. You saw us prove what we already know and what the Cardinals already know: that we’re the better team (for all the good it does us at this point).

But it’s funny how you realize things when meaningful games start that you just didn’t realize before. I realize that I wasted all my time this winter worrying about the starting pitching when what I should have been worried about was the bullpen. I didn’t even realize that I was worried about the bullpen until my stomach started to make noises when the bullpen had to protect a four and then a five run lead in the first game. Why did it do that? I think it was because I was still traumatized by the collapse of the bullpen in the 2nd, 6th, and 7th game of the NLCS, a collapse that cost us the pennant. I’d forgotten this trauma during the offseason. It came back as soon as meaningful games resumed. You realize that you have a baseball unconscious.

Now that what was unconscious has become conscious, I really have to wonder what I was thinking. Do I know enough about the guys who are supposed to give us what Mota, Sanchez, Oliver, and Bradford gave us last year? No. Am I comfortable enough yet, in my irrational depths, with Wagner and Heilman? Not yet.

So I’m worried, in my unconscious. My conscious mind tells me that everything is really really good. But I have dread, angst, and schpilkes in my depths and I’m not sure what will clean them out of there except getting to the World Series this year. Because the deep crazy part of me is saying that even if we have a great season this year, it can all go to hell in the playoffs. Just like that! Poof! I’m being terribly inconsistent. Remember I’m the guy who said we don’t have to get to the World Series for this to be a successful season:

 http://danabrand.com/blog/2007/03/02/world-series-or-bust-really/

I still believe that, in my conscious mind. But there’s some fool down in there who hears this and says “yeah, yeah.” Shoot, I don’t want to worry all season even if we’re doing well. I don’t want this kind of psychology, so selfish, so Yankee. Why am I feeling this? Somebody stop me.

The first game of the season was all it should have been.  You see what we have.  We have so much depth and strength in that lineup that we can score six runs even on a day when most of our best hitters are only so-so.  We have a superb defensive team.  You saw that catch by Alou, that throw by Beltran, and the dazzling play of Valentin.  These may have been the most revealing moments of this game. 

We know Glavine can pitch like that three quarters of the time.  We have a good bullpen that will scare us and come through for us for most of the season.  We were playing the World Champions but we were obviously the better team.  We won decisively but there were a couple of moments when it could all have fallen apart.  We had a couple of those bad moments in last year’s NLCS.  I’m not saying that that the Cardinal’s victory was a fluke.  It wasn’t.  But if those two teams played 10 seven-game series against each other, I wouldn’t bet on the Cards winning five of them. 

It was important to win this first game.  Because Mets fans are confident but scared.  They think the team will do well, but they can easily imagine a disaster.  One game doesn’t mean very much, but the first game can matter.  I still think that if the Mets hadn’t blown that opening day game against the Reds in 2005, they wouldn’t have started the season losing 5 straight and that very good season might very well have ended with a Wild Card.

So they should be cool and confident.  They’ll need it for these first three series.  It’s rare that the first three series are such a test.  The Cards.  The Braves.  The Phillies.  The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.  We have something to prove to all three teams and all three have something to prove to us.  It doesn’t exactly feel like April.