David Wright’s Big Game Stands By Itself

10/31/2015

Swipe Tag Not Bad for a Guy With Spinal Stenois

Before this World Series began, I thought that anything more would be gravy.

No Yankee sense of entitlement, just humility and awe at seeing this team-on-the-fly in the World Series, against a team that plays the game right.

As a Met fan staying home and watching, I could not have wished a game like Friday’s for David Wright, but there it is – a two-run homer that energized the Mets, two more runs on a single later.

And two Jeterian plays in the field – a scramble into the corner to fetch a ball and hold the batter to a single, and a swipe tag that was validated by replay. He didn’t dive into the stands and bloody himself. But he would have.

I wrote about Wright nine days ago, and Tyler Kepner had a lovely column in Saturday’s NYT; I don’t have to go over it again – upstanding leader, solid player, and now, for one manic night, the star of a World Series victory.

Noah Syndegaard’s strong six innings, perhaps you could trace them back to the day in spring training when Wright and Bobby Parnell dumped Syndegaard’s lunch in the garbage.

Friday was the reward for Wright, for Syndegaard, and maybe even for Parnell who ran out of velocity in his comeback.

No idea how the Mets will do, as of Saturday morning. But I would like to quote the eminent baseball sage, Johnny Damon, who on the night the Red Sox fell behind, three games to none, to the Yankees in 2004, stood in the crowded clubhouse at Fenway and calmly told reporters: "Unless I'm mistaken, we've won four straight before." (Turned out they had, eight times.)

The Mets have had their own streaks in this run. And David Wright had a game that he and Mets fans can and should always remember, on its own.

Roy Edelsack

10/31/2015 10:20:55 am

Went last night with my son . Ridiculously emotional. The captain homers. Granderson homer lands right under us. Billy Joel. Mike Piazza. Standup to cancer (just lost my brother this year). Moment of silence for murdered police officer. Syndergaard goes high and tight, looks shaky but then figures it out.

What a night!

George Vecsey

10/31/2015 10:48:59 am

It really was. It's hard to feel part of it watching the national/international network broadcast. I got some photos of the 7 train via somebody who was on it. My condolences to your family. GV

Mendel

10/31/2015 12:29:48 pm

No gratuitous bat-flip for Captain Wright. For now, at least, Citi Field has a home run moment to rival Piazza's post-9/11. Goosebumps all over again.

Peter Kennedy link

10/31/2015 05:47:42 pm

Thanks, George. You nailed it. I also enjoyed Roy and Mendel's reflections. Like you all, I don't know how this is going to end up, but I'm just grateful to be watching it -- and grateful, especially, for David and Terry. I know, for those pros, that it's about winning it all - World Champs and all that - but I'm just happy for them that they are in the World Series, in New York, with thousands of loving fans watching. I'm proud to be among them. We'll remember this magic run even if we don't win it all. So will David, how may be more physically brittle than any of us realize. But I'll save that nagging worry for another day. LGM.

George Vecsey

10/31/2015 07:20:45 pm

Peter, thanks for the note. The Mets are built on gratitude for their existence, going back to 1962 when first fans were happy to see Elio Chacon and Marv Throneberry and Jay Hook and the rest -- just to have National League ball back in NYC after the Dark Ages. I submit that Mets fans, young, sense the same thing. Nobody expected this.
Almost gametime...Best, GV

Gao Dianmin

11/1/2015 06:06:40 am

My Dear George, How are you!
I found you at last after 7 years!
I'm now in London and will back to Beijing soon.
Send me e-mail.
Regards,

Gao

George Vecsey

11/1/2015 07:46:21 am

親愛高：好聽到你的聲音。
喬治

Dear Gao: Great to hear from you. I will write soon. George

Mendel

11/2/2015 08:10:53 am

How long before a recap post, George. We're all going to need a place to wind down...

jenny link

5/8/2017 12:18:27 am

thank you gorge

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

David Wright’s Big Game Stands By Itself

Categories

Buy the Book