OH. That’s right. He also can look like this.
We forget sometimes, because there are times when Jose Reyes can be the most frustrating player in baseball. He can make impossible errors at shortstop. He can fill his scorecard with one P-4 after another. Sometimes when he runs the bases like Amy Winehouse on a bender he actually makes Mets fans want to light themselves on fire.
And man, oh man, was there ever last September.
So these past few weeks, while the Mets were turning themselves into daily fodder for local baseball psychologists, SNY’s answer to “In Treatment,” the subject who’s spent the most time on the couch was Reyes, who got picked off a couple of times in Denver, whose faulty mitt let the floodgates free against the Marlins on the Day of Willie’s Reprieve, who even manages to anger fans when he hits “too many” home runs (which means some locals would have been really, really ticked at Babe Ruth back in the day).
“What’s wrong with Jose?” the people asked. “Can he ever get it back?”
Actually, the subject in that last one should be spelled this way – It, capital “I” – because if ever there’s been an It Player around Shea, it has been Reyes.
At his best, you’ve never seen anyone like him. Every trip to the plate could mean a triple. Every dash into the hole could yield a Web Gem. And every time he draws a walk, you expect to see him on third base 17 seconds later. That’s an It Player.
“It’s no secret, really,” Willie Randolph said. “When he does well, we do well.”
Only, where had It gone? What had caused It to disappear? Mets fans missed It. Hell, forget the Mets; if you simply like baseball, you missed It.
A funny thing about Reyes, though? We tend to grade him on such a ridiculous curve, even when he isn’t displaying It with every step, he’s showing something. Even as his game went sliding into the wood chipper, he was building what last night stretched into a hitting streak of 17 games and an on-base streak of 32 during the Mets’ 6-1 win over the Dodgers.
He was still the one player in the Mets’ batting order who caused opposing managers to start counting backward if they were tied or held a late-inning lead: When will Reyes be coming up? And just the mere act of watching him run could make even the exacting Shea customers lose their anger for a few seconds.
Oh, and there’s this: “The kid,” Randolph said, “is still very, very young.” The kid, in fact, doesn’t turn 25 for another nine days. Even if it sometimes feels like he came up with Cleon Jones.
Last night Reyes firmly lugged his It game onto the field against the Dodgers. Before the game became a route in the third inning, Reyes was the game, was the night, in a way only he can really be, even on a night when Johan Santana pitches up to his billing.
He singled, stole second, scored the tying run in the first. He doubled, took third on an out, scored the go-ahead run in the third. And earlier, in the top of the third, he scampered far to his left, dove, stabbed Jeff Kent’s sharp grounder and instead of LA looking at first-and-third, one out, he turned it into a perfectly photogenic 6-4-3.
All in a night’s work, when Reyes has It going. And for all the hand-wringing that has squeezed so much of the life out of the baseball spring, it’s worth noting that these are Reyes’ projected numbers for 2008, if he only maintains the pace that has so disappointed so many of his acolytes: 21 homers, 75 RBIs, 114 runs, 57 steals, 15 triples, 39 doubles.
“We forget,” Randolph said last week, “that in many ways, he is still learning.”
We do. And before last night, it was easy to forget that he is still the most remarkable It player in baseball when he’s in possession of all his powers. When he is, it really is something to behold. It really is.