THE plumbing backed up in the Mets’ clubhouse yesterday, flooding the place, making the home opener something of a dress rehearsal for an October champagne celebration.
It looked a little that way. So many smiling faces making sure not to slip on the wet floor. A win to celebrate. The heroes being marched into an interview room.
OK, OK, enough with the October fantasies. I promised myself I wouldn’t jump on any bandwagons in April. Why not? With all the key lime pie I consumed during spring training, any bandwagon would collapse if I jumped on it.
Anyway, it was just an early April win against a young, weak ballclub, and the interview room was used only because the flood made the clubhouse off limits to reporters for fear they might stir what was on the floor.
Still, yesterday’s 8-1 win over the Marlins in the Mets’ home opener supplied the latest evidence why it’s not unreasonable to fantasize that come this October a national audience will get to see just what a dump is this place the Mets call home.
Timely hitting masking Mike Piazza’s absence, Robin Ventura making 52,052 ask whether he and Brooks Robinson had ever been seen in the same place, and New York’s best bullpen doing its thing combined to make it a great day for the Mets.
And, oh yeah, we almost forgot to mention Bobby Jones, who allowed one run in seven innings and hit his first career home run. I always almost forget to mention Bobby Jones, which doesn’t make me any different than a lot of people.
Jones is easy to take for granted. For one thing, his name isn’t even the most vanilla thing about him; his quotes are.
The pitcher doesn’t call attention to himself and neither does his array of pitches. He has a nice curveball, a decent changeup and an average fastball with good movement, an effective pitch when well- located.
Everything about the guy screams .500 pitcher. Everything, that is, except his record. Jones (2-0, 0.64) has a .569 career winning percentage, second only to Orel Hershiser among Mets starters.
Even Jones, 29, made the mistake of calling himself a .500 pitcher when explaining his statistically-poor spring training was more productive than the numbers indicate.
He was working on things, such as pitching low and away to right-handed hitters, so that he could “become more than a .500 pitcher.”
Asked about that later, he corrected himself, knowing that in three of his five full big-league seasons he has had a winning record. He said he wished he had said “more consistent” instead of “more than a .500 pitcher.” It figures. The guy finally comes up with a snappy, albeit not precisely accurate, quote and he retracts it five minutes later.
Oh, well, the Mets don’t pay him to fill notebooks. They pay him to win ballgames and he did that yesterday with his arm and swing. Not that Jones doesn’t have a great swing. He can drive the ball all right. It’s just that the ball usually has dimples and says Titleist.
His first home run, which came in his 296th career at-bat, off Livan Hernandez in the fifth, was no cheap shot. It didn’t stay fair by much but easily cleared the left-field fence.
He didn’t trot at first.
“I put my head down and sprinted,” he said.
How do you know you have hit it far enough when you never have hit it far enough?
“Senior year in high school,” Jones said of his last home run. “I think I batted third.”
He pitches third now in the Mets’ rotation. At best he’s the second-best golfer named Bobby Jones. And he’s not even the best Mets pitcher to graduate from Fresno High.
But consider this next time you feel like joining the rest of the world in taking Bobby Jones for granted: Tom Seaver threw a pitch from a mound yesterday and it wasn’t even close to being the best pitch thrown from that mound by a graduate of Fresno High. Bet that’s a first.
