IT’S easy to forget how much these games mean to those who wondered if they’d ever be allowed to play in one. We are so used to the idea of Derek Jeter playing in October, or Bernie Williams, or Mariano Rivera that we forget that every year, someone gets to stare wide-eyed at the postseason for the very first time.
That is what makes watching Carlos Delgado these past few weeks so gratifying, so satisfying. In its own way, it recalls the grand autumn of 1996, when Joe Torre was walking through the first real October of his life, when every day was filled with fresh, new possibilities, when there always seemed to be a wonder in his eyes that seemed so unusual given that those eyes belonged to a then-56-year-old man who’d seen a lot, who’d been around more than a few blocks.
“I wanted to make sure I took as many snapshots with my eyes as I could, because I never wanted to forget what it all felt like, and looked like,” Torre said earlier this season, remembering ’96. “You can never have the audacity to believe you’ll be able to go back to the playoffs as often as we have. It’s why I always tell the guys who come here and play in October for the first time, ‘Get your work done, be serious, but make sure you remember to have fun, too.’ ”
But even Torre was no postseason virgin in 1996, since he’d had a brief three-day stay in the National League playoffs as the manager of the Braves in 1982. For Delgado, it’s different. It’s all different. For so long, he seemed destined to spend a splendid career on the wrong side of the postseason window.
He’d appeared in two games and gotten one official at-bat as a 21-year-old kid in 1993, the year the Blue Jays won their second of back-to-back championships. He actually owns a World Series ring thanks to that at-bat, although he never wore a uniform in October. It was a taunting taste of what he wanted most – and what he wondered if he could ever have.
“This is great,” Delgado said last night, a few hours before the Mets would take on the Cardinals in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, a night after collecting two doubles in three at-bats, giving him eight hits in 17 at-bats to begin the playoffs, a terrific way to start the postseason phase of a distinguished career.
“You know, watching it on TV for the longest time, I tried to play as hard as I could for as long as I could to get here, and it seemed every year we came up short in that American League Eastern Division,” he said. “Having the opportunity to be here and to have the opportunity to win is an amazing feeling. I think we’ve been rewarded. We earned it and we’ve been rewarded.”
Delgado certainly has been. After 407 regular-season home runs across parts of 14 years, he finally hit one in October off Derek Lowe in the second postseason at-bat he ever had, part of a 4-for-5 day against the Dodgers last week in Game 1 of the Division Series, and he hasn’t slowed down yet.
Delgado is playing this well in the first extended amount of postseason play he has ever really seen, given that he could never quite move himself to watch a lot of it in past years, so painful was the reality of what he’d always missed. In that way he was also like Torre, who used to despise October baseball because he would inevitably see his name listed as one of the people who’d taken part in the most games without ever making the World Series.
“To me, the moment I would start watching, you start thinking, you just get competitive and say, well, he’s going to throw this now, or that, and he should do this or that. And you’re not there, you’re just watching. That was difficult. So I usually stopped watching.”
His eyes are wide open now. He plans on keeping them that way for a while.
