The list stretches from David Aardsma to Todd Zeile: 154 major leaguers who have played for both the Mets and the Yankees. The latest, David Robertson, is glad to be back in town.
“It’s different — you get a big crowd all the time, and then you get a good group traveling on the road with you,” Robertson said after helping the Mets to a 5-2 victory over the San Diego Padres at Citi Field on Wednesday. “I like that. New Yorkers want to win. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on — they want to win, and they’re going to show up.”
The fans showed up in force for the Mets’ first homestand of the season, just as they did for the first two series at Yankee Stadium. Each team opened its home schedule by going 4-2 in its homestand, with attendance topping 30,000 each time. The pitch clock greatly improved the appeal of the product: Only one game in each ballpark reached three hours.
Baseball was showing off on Wednesday — 77 degrees at game time, without even a hint of April’s usual airy chill by Flushing Bay. There was sunshine, slugging and steals: a missile to the distant Shea Bridge by the Padres’ Juan Soto, and then blasts by Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso of the Mets — or the “go-go Mets,” as Manager Buck Showalter called them after his team stole three bases Wednesday.
The Mets have 14 steals (tied with Pittsburgh for fourth in Major League Baseball through Wednesday) and have been caught only once. The Mets had 62 steals last season, ranking 23rd in the majors. If you guessed that Showalter — master of preparation — would find a way to capitalize on the hurry-up rules, you were right.
“The biggest rule that’s made it tougher to hold runners is you can’t hold the ball and stop them from cheating in their lead,” Showalter said. “It makes a lot of runners into stolen-base threats that weren’t in the past.”
On Wednesday, Tommy Pham stole second base with two outs in the second inning and scored on Brandon Nimmo’s double. Mark Canha stole second in the third, and Jeff McNeil took second in the sixth, and each time, Padres starter Blake Snell walked the next hitter. A faster game is more interesting.
“I’ve got three stolen bases already,” said Nimmo, an on-base darling who managed just three steals in 151 games last season. “I’m not going to run just to run, but if the opportunity arises, yeah, we’ll take advantage of it. More so, you just want to take care of the guys that are being flippant about their times. If they don’t really care, you’ve got to take bags from those guys.”
The Mets left town after Wednesday’s game with a 7-6 record. They will play their next 10 games in California, visiting the Oakland Athletics for three, the Los Angeles Dodgers for three and the San Francisco Giants for four. It is too early for a true read on the team, but the Mets recovered nicely after their opening road trip ended with three consecutive losses in Milwaukee.
“We played really good team ball,” Alonso said. “We pitched well, we played great defense, and I feel like overall we had great team at-bats — one through nine, we did a great job grinding down starting pitchers, getting deep into bullpens and capitalizing on opportunities. We’re going to get better as the season goes on, but going 4-2 was a good bounce-back.”
The ace right-hander Justin Verlander, signed as a replacement once Jacob deGrom had departed for the Texas Rangers, did not fly with the team; he is heading to Florida as he works through shoulder inflammation. Before he can make his Mets debut, Showalter said, Verlander will need a couple of bullpen sessions, a round of live batting practice, and then a minor league rehab game.
That program seems likely to keep Verlander out until early May — not late April, as he had hoped — but there is no reason to rush. There are six National League playoff spots, after all, and Tylor Megill has now won three times in Verlander’s absence after working five innings on Wednesday.
Showalter used four relievers to finish up, knowing they all could rest before the next game on Friday. The star closer, Edwin Díaz, was on site but was still using crutches after tearing the patellar tendon in his right knee at the World Baseball Classic in March.
“The recovery’s eight months — some people do it before, some people do it after,” Díaz said. “If we can keep doing what we’re doing right now — everything with the trainer, working hard, if the knee keeps responding to the testing, then I have to start running, I have to get on the mound, I have to start throwing — if everything goes well, I think I can be back sooner than eight months.”
That’s a long checklist, so it’s comforting for the Mets to have other veterans who are familiar with late-inning situations. Robertson has 159 career saves, and another former Yankee, Adam Ottavino, got the 34th of his career with a scoreless ninth on Wednesday.
With the Philadelphia Phillies last October, Robertson saved the World Series opener before a raucous crowd in Houston, stranding the tying and winning runs on base. He approaches every appearance the same way, from his major league debut at Shea Stadium at 23 — a two-inning stint in relief of Darrell Rasner for the Yankees in June 2008 — through an April matinee at age 38.
“Last year I was throwing seventh, eighth, ninth inning, extras, whatever,” said Robertson, who snuffed a rally in the seventh on Wednesday and then wiggled from a self-created jam in the eighth. “It’s all the same to me. You’ve just got to go out there and get guys out. You can’t overthink it.”
Robertson, a right-hander, last pitched for the Yankees in 2018, during his second stint with the team, before signing with Philadelphia as a free agent. His path back to New York wound through Tommy John surgery; a tuneup in an amateur men’s league in Rhode Island; a spot on the United States team at the Tokyo Olympics; the Tampa Bay Rays; the Chicago Cubs; and the Phillies again.
He’s evolving as he ages. On Monday, Robertson fanned the Padres’ Trent Grisham with a changeup. The last time he threw one that worked, he guessed, was to Torii Hunter in 2015. He’s also learning to adjust his grip on his fastball, he said, to keep it true and to differentiate it from his cutter.
“It’s another view for the hitter to look at,” said Robertson, who has two saves this season. “If you throw one that doesn’t cut and they think it’s going to cut, you may miss a barrel.”
In the off-season, though, it was Robertson who whiffed. He acts as his own agent and secured a lucrative deal (one year, $10 million) in the city where his client wanted to pitch. But Robertson missed one detail: With Díaz seemingly locked in at closer, he forgot to ask for a bonus clause for games finished.
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