Edwin Diaz....and Hope....Are Back

So many bad things going on, sport is the least of it.  
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But sport teaches you to hope, to endure – an experiment in a test tube. 
Take Edwin Diaz of the New York Mets. Last March his Puerto Rican national teammates piled on him in a victory scrum in the World Baseball Classic.
The weight, the motion, crumpled his right knee.  Within minutes, fans and players and doctors alike knew he would not pitch for a long time, or maybe ever.

The gloom took over. If you ask me, the loss of Sugar Diaz caused the Mets to go into a shell, made stalwarts like Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil try to over-hit the ball, put pressure on creaky elder pitchers – effectively ruining an entire season.
Mets fans (and Mets writers) tend to think we are experiencing the mood swings of all humanity. We are from New York, representing New York, and we tend to think it is the center of the universe. So the loss of Edwin Diaz and his sizzling sideways slider put the entire planet off kilter (including things that really are important.)

The season was empty. Darkness enveloped the land. The world was out of kilter, without the loudspeaker blasting the Edwin Diaz entrance anthem, “Narco,” recorded by an Australian known as Timmy Trumpet.  
Would we ever hear it again, see it again, cheer it again?

Tonight (Monday, March 11, 2024) we heard it again, in an exhibition game in Florida.
After a year of rehab and work, Diaz made his return in a spring exhibition game in the Mets’ home ball park in Florida. An electrical failure seemed a bad omen in the first inning, blacking out 10 minutes of tv, but the game returned, and in the fourth inning, the screen showed Diaz slipping into the bullpen, to warm up, as if he had never been away.
           
In the top of the fifth inning, the sound system blasted the music of Timmy Trumpet, the ritual in our souls from the 2022 season. Edwin Diaz jogged to the mound and struck out three straight Miami hitters – all of them major-leaguers, not bushers filling out a road exhibition roster.

His slider slashed at an impossible straight line from 90 degrees to 270 degrees, across the plate. Three straight strikeouts. Not even the emotional Mets fans could have hoped for this. Then Diaz skipped off to the home dugout to be embraced by staff and teammates.

Back home in Long Island, all the bad stuff in the news – the fighting, the starvation, the threats, the bombast, the stupidity -- was temporarily overshadowed.  

Between innings, Diaz was interviewed Michelle Margaux, the sideline reporter, and I scribbled down phrases in quite decent English, like, “I feel good…amazing…in front of the crowd…I was making pitches….I want to say thank-you…I spent time with my family, my kids, I had time with my friends, and I was working hard…I missed my teammates…we are a family, really close….”

Sugar Diaz said he had missed the trumpet at the ball park – but at home, he added, his two children often played “Narco,” the blare of Timmy Trumpet, which clearly revived the spring in the reconstructed knee of Edwin Diaz.

So maybe this is the start of something – light instead of dark, warmth instead of wind, perhaps even, do I dare say it, sanity instead of madness.
I am not sure I love the new ownership of the Mets – making Pete Alonso dangle, listening way too much to the analytics dweebs who value lusty longball swings rather than professional hitting strokes.

In the Cohen stewardship, I have been brushing up on my Italian, the quote from Dante’s Inferno, that I memorized years ago:  “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” (Abandon all hope, ye who enter.)

In the daily grind of baseball, the buzz lasts only one night.
But after watching the sliders of Sugar Diaz, I have hope, and that is something.