WHEN you hit baseballs for a living, no matter who you are, no matter how long you’ve been doing it, you go through bursts of hell just like this. You pop up hanging sliders. You swing through fat fastballs. You hit scorching line drives right at the shortstop. Keep swinging, they say. Keep your head up, they say. These things even out, they say.
“But they never even out,” Willie Randolph said with a smile. “Not really.”
For a few moments there yesterday, David Wright may actually have believed that. Everyone knows that Wright’s been going through a lull the past few weeks, that the dog days have bitten him on the ankles a bit, that baseball’s relentless mathematics have begun to catch up to him a bit. Wright himself conceded he has spent more than a few sleepless nights beating himself up lately.
“But it isn’t because my numbers were down, it honestly wasn’t,” he said. “To me, when I struggle, I feel like I let the team down, and I don’t want to be the guy people point to as letting these guys down. Fortunately, they’ve been picking me up. If we were losing, it would really be tough to take. But when you’re putting Ws on the board, no one cares who’s struggling.”
Still, in the bottom of the third inning, when he watched the ball knuckle off his bat, then hug the third-base line, then kiss the bag . . . and then, impossibly when he saw third-base umpire Randy Marsh wave his arms and call the ball foul . . .
“Sometimes,” he said, “things really just don’t go your way.”
But this is David Wright we are talking about, remember, golden kid with a golden touch and a platinum attitude, who for much of the season looked like a cross between Roy Hobbs and Joe Hardy. If he has only hit two homers since the All-Star break, if he has barely hit over .200 in August, he’s still the heart around which these Mets have been built, and will be built.
Good things happen to David Wright. And good things happened to him now: Willie Randolph came dashing out of the dugout. Marsh conferred with his fellow umpires. Charlie Manuel came lumbering out of the Phillies’ dugout, and he wore the look of a man who’d just had his wallet lifted, and soon his face was as red as his ballcap, and soon he was kicking his shoes off in the visitor’s clubhouse.
“When I saw him getting thrown out of the game,” Wright said with a grin, “I knew I might be in some pretty good shape.”
He was. He was awarded one of the strangest hits he’ll ever get, he collected his 92nd RBI of the season, he’d add No. 93 on a blistering sac fly, and the Mets were well on the way to an 8-3 win and an 8-1 homestand.
“Maybe this was the thing he needed to get going again,” Randolph said. “By the time we get back here (six days from now, after a tour through Colorado and Houston), he’ll be back over .300 again.”
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how young Wright is, how early in the game it really is for him. He carries himself like a 10-year veteran. But he’s smart enough to know how much learning he has yet to do.
So he watched carefully as Carlos Delgado grinded through three separate extended slumps this year and never once let it affect his defense, his demeanor, or his dependability as a teammate. He’s seen another New York third baseman suffer through the agonies of an unforgiving summer. He’s taken notes.
“It’s a humbling game,” Wright said. “If you forget that, it’s always there to remind you. Carlos was always about winning, no matter how tough things got for him. And A-Rod, he’ll be fine, he’ll be coronated all over again if that team wins a championship. That’s all the fans in New York care about. They don’t worry about your individual statistics. They care about winning. The other stuff takes care of itself eventually.”
Breaks, for instance. Randolph’s right: For most, the bloops and the dunks never seem to quite match up to the at-’em balls, the diving catches, the wall-climbing thefts. Still, if you’re David Wright, you can believe that even if they don’t even up, things will usually turn out OK one way or another. Because when you’re David Wright, they usually do.
