LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — There have been so many times when the crowd at Champion Stadium, a sizable one, would have been focused entirely on one person. This is where the Atlanta Braves play their home games during the spring, but there were an awful lot of Mets fans here.
A lot of SYNDERGAARD No. 34 jerseys.
A few TEBOW No. 15 jerseys.
I saw two No. 33 Matt Harvey jerseys, and I had to make a pilgrimage to find those. This is 2018, after all, not 2013, when Harvey lit up the baseball sky in New York, or 2015, when his first return from injury was a mostly triumphant welcome-home, all the way to the ninth inning of Game 5 of the World Series.
In 2018, Matt Harvey is just another pitcher about to enter his walk year without a surplus of statistics to make that journey palatable. There are dozens of players just like him in Florida and Arizona, guys who once burned brightly and now hope to rediscover that magic, somehow, under the February sun.
“We can rely on Matt Harvey,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said after the Mets were done beating the Braves, 6-4, before they could dash to the bus and make the two-hour slog back to Port St. Lucie.
Those six words aren’t exactly what you ever thought would pass as good news for Harvey before the shoulder went, and before the elbow went, and before he spent 2017 ducking out of the way of line drives when he wasn’t burying his alarm clock under his pillow.
But this is 2018, and this was a good day for Harvey. There was one run allowed in two innings, two strikeouts, one walk, a bunch of pitches that hit 95 on the gun and one that hit 96. Mostly, there was a sense that for the first time in a long time, Harvey had an idea where the ball was going. And for the first time in a long time, the ball actually arrived where he intended it to go.
“I’m happy with the outing,” Harvey said. “I’m looking forward to continuing this more in the spring.”
His spring debut was greeted with a fair amount of cheering — but nothing at all compared to the moment a few innings later, when Tebow dug into the batter’s box as a pinch hitter (he grounded into a double play). The roars belong elsewhere now. Harvey Day, even one in the sleepy background of spring, is no longer a happening but more of a pilot episode for one of the core series on SNY: “Oh, Yeah …”
As in, “Oh, yeah … he’s still on the team.”
There are an awful lot of sad elements to that story, of course, starting with the way that once-bulletproof right arm has twice betrayed him. For whatever else has happened to him, it is essential to remember just how brightly his star used to burn in a city that burnishes them.
And if you remember what that version of Harvey was like — and you’re a fan of the player, the team, or just baseball itself — there has to be a part of you that hopes Wednesday was the first step toward something resembling a renaissance.
There has to be a part of you that noticed just how much Harvey enjoyed facing Freddie Freeman, the Braves’ brilliant first baseman, in the bottom of the first inning, one out and a man on first — and how much striking Freeman out looking on a 94-mph heater on the black gave him a noticeable jolt.
“We’ve gotten to be good friends though the years,” Harvey said of Freeman, “and it’s always nice to be on the positive end facing him.”He answered a dozen questions politely but dully, part of that being the Mets’ strategy to drain whenever possible whatever passes for colorful in their clubhouse. But that’s probably the wise course for Harvey to take anyway. He wasn’t a razor-sharp wit back in the day, but he did say a thing or three that rose to the level of interesting.
These days, he seems committed to keeping his head down, his mouth shut and his name off the disabled list and out of Page Six. There’s a lot of steps in that journey after this one. But it was a good place to start.