March Indifference

My rabid enthusiasm for baseball took a stroll one fine Spring morning and tore a hamstring. I should have seen it coming. I felt twinges some weeks back when I read about Mike Cameron’s bone spurs and Cliff Floyd’s internal health meter getting stuck on an "80%" reading. It acted up again when Mike Piazza faced the rigors of playing first base groin-on and showed that a steady diet of pomegranate seeds and coral dust do not a healthy season guarantee. When I sat down with the sole purpose of being entertained by the Mets younger players in a Spring Training game and saw my favorite, Reyes, limping off the field after what looked to be a routine play, well, that’s probably when they penciled my name in on the Disgusted List and let Kyle run this place. For that consequence, and not my absence, I do heartily apologize. The recent and inevitable spate of preseason injuries have been getting me down.

Everything looked good a few weeks ago when our first taste of baseball was savored like a fine wine, and predictions for our favorites were made as if by a wino. But the promise of Spring Training is as meaningless as the vows Chipper Jones swears when he gets married, because a team that’s good on paper isn’t worth a damn when God throws scissors. The preseason has devolved for me from a brilliant and hope-inspiring display of skill to a macabre game of attrition, wherein fate, luck, or an inability to withstand the Big Mac wreck players’ bodies and rob us of witnessing the best competition possible.

A case in point: Word is Trot Nixon will be out until May, and Nomar was questionable for the season’s start. Bernie Williams has just recently quit expelling useless organs and started putting balls in play. With Pedro and Kevin Brown yet to succumb to the injury bug, the Yanks and Sox are engaging in a different sort of arms race (whose stays on the longest, perhaps), which further magnifies the regrettable importance health has on a baseball season. I’d love to watch those two behemoths battle it out at full strength for an entire 162, but we all know that’s not going to happen. It’s sad that the most significant storylines so far in that contest are about Yankee injuries and the likelihood of more to follow. Say Giambi goes down, New York’s rotation goes lame at just the wrong time, and Boston wins the division. Do the mitigating injuries preclude Red Sox Nation from squealing a collective "Cowboy Up!" and momentarily removing the gun from its head? No, sadly, no. There’s no asterisk for injury-abetted conquests, and there probably shouldn’t be. After all, we’ll need to save some for those bastard juicers, right?

Injuries also make for some terrible stories. There are many bad trains of thought departing from the mechanical minds of baseball writers, especially at this time of year, and even though the history of the sport and sheer length of its season seem to beg for recurring themes, there isn’t a formulaic plug-in less satisfying than the tale of the injured seeking redemption. This article about expectations for JD Drew by SI.com’s Jacob Luft sidesteps that path, yet still merits a groan for Luft’s pragmatism about great players performing well even in shortened seasons. We can be happy with what we get if the numbers are good enough, Luft says, but I say the numbers be damned. I derive value from Ripkin-esque consistency, though a stathead might not be able to quantify the enjoyment of a baseball fan who can count on watching his favorite players regularly. If Reyes goes on to hit .300 with 10 homers and 65 RBI in 100 games, my dance for joy will be tempered by the what-ifs of injury time that are filed away in the same soft-focus dream sequences Kyle reserves for dates with beautiful female celebrities or females period.

So I’m frustrated with the Mets and baseball in general these days. I’m rooting for the comeback players even as I wince at their setbacks, and I’ve resigned myself to the knowledge that getting hurt for no good reason is the nature of the game. Hell, it’s the nature of humanity -- I earned my dismissal from the evolutionary roster by slamming my hand in a truck door at work this week, and the thing turned colors so awful I expect to see them on a major league uniform soon. I can’t stay disillusioned with baseball for very long, though. Rest assured I’ll be watching -- and hoping that my winces at bloated digits come from the effort of crossing my mangled fingers and not Braden Looper’s prodigious ERA.