Attach the Chair of Triumph!

Usually Brodie Van Wagenen throws the chair of unfettered frustration. Following the successful resolution of baseball activities Saturday night in Miami, we can close our eyes (or keep them wide open if we’re over on the West Side) and imagine instead Brodie threw the chair of temporary redemption. Throwing chairs still seems like unseemly behavior for a stylish executive such as himself, but let’s let the GM have this fling. What he traded for in December arrived in July for the first time since April.

A game-winning home run from Robinson Cano. A game-saving inning from Edwin Diaz. The future nightmare of Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn for now merely the stuff of bad dreams. Even Jay Bruce cooperated, flying out as a pinch-hitter in the Phillies’ loss to the Nationals. Not that we’re chasing the Phillies or the Nationals in any but the most deluded mind, but the way things have gone recently, you’d expect Bruce to follow the Mets around from city to city and join their opponents series by series just to make Van Wagenen’s signature trade look progressively worse.

Until Kelenic is up in the majors making like Michael Conforto did in the third — launching a slump-interrupting two-run homer out of the two-hole — and until Dunn is doing his best Noah Syndergaard impression — seven sharp innings featuring nine strikeouts, with the final eleven Marlins he faced going down in order — that little swap of Eventually for Immediately can only look incrementally better to us. We’ve already decided it’s the 21st-century amalgam of Amos Otis and Nolan Ryan for a chronic case of impetigo. It might very well be that soon, but before box scores from the Pacific Northwest taunt us clear to the end of the next decade, we are entitled to enjoy the occasional evening when the trade works as well as it possibly can.

In the eighth inning on Saturday, with Dom Smith having singled in front of him, Cano held up his end of the shall we say bargain, sending a no-doubter over the right field wall to break a 2-2 tie. Cano’s post-swing Ratso Rizzo-inflected body language (“I’m STANDIN’ here!”) certainly expressed no doubts. The baserunner who’s made himself famous for redefining effortlessness between home and first gauged the ball he blasted off Nick Anderson quite correctly. Robbie could take his sweet time starting his trot because his homer departed the Jeter Confines in a big damn hurry.

The bottom of the ninth belonged to Diaz, just as it was supposed to: in fact as well as in name. Save No. 20 wasn’t the stuff of Formula 409. Edwin doesn’t necessarily blind us with clean innings. Too often he spreads mud so thoroughly over the late-game countertop that you wish a roll of Bounty was warming up in the pen behind him. Sure enough, he did allow a one-out single to Marlin Starlin Castro, and just as surely, there was a sizzler off the bat of Harold Ramirez that he had to thank his luckiest stars landed in the glove of extremely well-situated quicker picker-upper Todd Frazier. Yet when there was a tying run at the plate with two out, Diaz ended the angst with a quick spritz of a called strike three past Jorge Alfaro.

Diaz records the clutch save. Cano cracks a key homer. Those two events occurred in conjunction with one another on Opening Day, March 29. They occurred again on April 6. They didn’t reoccur until July 13. Three months between the two ex-Mariner jewels shining in tandem as powerful reasons for a Mets victory…you could grumble that’s an uncomfortably long gap between encouraging episodes to emerge from a very dicey transaction. Or you could simply smile at the 4-2 result that fell in the Mets’ favor and shrug, “hey, third time’s a charm.”

Yeah, let’s go with that for now.