Monday will be Jay Bruce’s ninth Opening Day as a major leaguer. One of the good things about playing enough baseball to make it to nine Opening Days is that the warm and the fuzzy have been smoothed out of a professional by then. The lyrical has been replaced by the grind.
Oh, make no mistake: Bruce is as excited as anyone at the prospect of a new season, especially this new season for the Mets, one that dawns with such hope and so many expectations. He is anxious to experience an Opening Day in New York: the full ballpark, the full throats, the full engagement of team and fan base.
“It’s just different here,” he said.
But even that is matter-of-fact. Bruce is no kid anymore. Monday, as it happens, isn’t just Opening Day, it’s also his 30th birthday. He can make a lot of money for himself this year, earn the last fat contract of his career, and he can lead the Mets to the playoffs for a third straight year, maybe to the franchise’s first championship in 31 years. Or it can all go the other way.
That’s the business of baseball. It can be a bear if you let it.
“It’s a long season, a lot of expeditions,” Bruce said Friday afternoon at Citi Field, where the Mets had gathered for an indoor workout after the final exhibition of the spring, against West Point, was rained out. “We’re all looking forward to getting in here and fulfilling those expectations.”
Unlike most of his teammates, though, Bruce remains a wild card to Mets fans, an outlier, the guy who almost came instead of Yoenis Cespedes two years ago at the trading deadline and did arrive last year on the same day, then proceeded to post a ghastly .174/.252/.285 slash line in his first 42 games and 159 plate appearances, numbers that caused the most alarming bits of slander often to tumble out of the stands at Citi.
Not “BOOOOOOOO!”
Not “#@&*@$###@@!!!!!”
But this: “Jason Bay.”
“Nobody,” Bruce said Friday, “had to tell me how disappointing that was, because nobody was more disappointed by how things went for me here at first than I was.”
What’s necessary to point out is Bruce actually bounced back boldly from that, in a way we normally appreciate around here. With the Mets needing to win just about every day across the season’s final week and a half, Bruce stepped up huge: he was .480/.538/1.000 over the last eight games, with four homers and eight RBIs.
That was enough to convince Bruce he could succeed here. And the team’s one-night stay in the 2016 postseason was enough of a tease that he kept thinking about just how electric Citi Field could be this season if the Mets could play the way they played in September over the full 162. It was also enough to make him hope the Mets’ pursuit of a trade would end as it did: with him back in Flushing for the final year of his contract.
“I didn’t concern myself with that, honestly,” Bruce said. “I decided I’d wait until something happened, if it happened. Had they decided to deal me, there would’ve been no hard feelings. I understand well the business of baseball. But I’m glad I’m still here to see how this plays out. I’m expecting some fun things.”
Nobody invested more time in Bruce last year than Terry Collins, who often would spend time with Bruce in his office feeding his confidence, tending to his slumps, telling him he’d been too good a big-league hitter for too long, he hadn’t just forgotten how to do it; Bruce did have 33 homers and 99 RBIs last year, after all.
“He truly believes he’s the guy we went and traded for,” Collins said, referring to the 241 career homers Bruce hit in his 20s. “He’s determined to be that guy for us.”
Every player wants to get off to a good start, but certain guys need it more than others. It really would behoove Bruce to break hot these first six games at Citi, to look more like the late September version of himself than the mid-August version. The locals are impatient to begin with. And there is the matter of crowd favorite Michael Conforto lurking on the roster, loitering in the voiceboxes of the faithful the first time Bruce goes 0-for-4. Such is life in the big market. Such is life in the big leagues.
“Let’s just play it,” Bruce said, his smile seeming to ask: Can’t we move this all up a couple days and start this up now?