Nationals 5 – Mets 3
VIERA, Fla. – Tom Glavine has a routine. After he finishes his warm-ups and is set to pitch, he stands on the mound and looks at the fielders behind him.
“Make sure everybody is ready,” he said.
Well, Glavine’s infield may be completely different from the one that began last season, but his four fielders certainly were ready yesterday. In the Mets’ first game of this spring training, the 5-3 loss to the Nationals was much less significant than the infield’s effort.
Indeed, in the first real test for the starting infield, you certainly can say the Mets responded.
“Our defense was pretty sharp,” Willie Randolph said.
The Mets’ young and brilliant left side of the infield – shortstop Jose Reyes and third baseman David Wright – gets most of the ink, but the right side of second baseman Kazuo Matsui and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz is as critical. Matsui is being counted on to learn a new position, and Mientkiewicz, the sole Gold Glove veteran among them, is entrusted with bringing everything together.
“We have some pitchers that throw strikes, and if they do their job, hopefully we’ll do our job, which is catch the ball,” Mientkiewicz said. “Let’s put it this way: I’ve won on a lot of teams with not as much talent as this one has. And that’s not a knock against my teams in the past, but we caught the ball. And if we do that here, we’ll win a lot of games.”
If you’re a Mets fan, it’s what made yesterday’s performance so encouraging. In the first inning, with a runner on first, Glavine got Jose Vidro to hit a grounder to Matsui. He calmly gobbled up the grounder and threw to Reyes at second for the force. But Reyes’ relay peg to first short-hopped Mientkiewicz.
No problem; Mientkiewicz picked it, finishing off the 4-6-3 double play with a pretty stab.
“In the end, that looks like a fairly routine play because he makes it so well,” Glavine said. “There’s such a big difference between the inning being over and having to face one more guy.”
Mientkiewicz then helped out in the second inning when Glavine picked off Jose Guillen at first base and caught him in a rundown. Mientkiewicz whipped the ball to second to get Guillen, and if you think that’s a normal throw for a first baseman, remember that it didn’t happen a lot last year at Shea.
From there, Matsui, who botched his first grounder in Monday’s intrasquad game, suddenly began unspooling highlight play after highlight play. In the third, Brian Schneider hit a slow roller to second that Matsui barehanded and flipped to first for the out.
“That play, you can’t practice for it,” Matsui said.
Randolph, a former second baseman, said, “One of those plays that you don’t draw up, but those are the plays you have to make as a second baseman.”
Two outs later, Matsui gloved Endy Chavez’s ball on a short-hop and gunned out the speedster. Two innings after that, Matsui charged Nick Johnson’s slow chopper, handled it and flipped it underhand to first for the out. Overall, Matsui fielded seven chances flawlessly. Not bad.
“There’s going to be a lot of different types of fielding situations that will come up,” Matsui said. “I just want to stay aggressive and make the plays you can.”
Matsui later downplayed his stellar performance, saying, “This is still only one game.”
True, but for that one game, he was ready. So was the rest of the infield.
