The Mind Goes Back

It was inevitable that the mind would go back to August 2005 and Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran lying in the outfield grass in San Diego.

That was an afternoon game in California, which meant it was on at the end of the workday here in New York. I heard the collision as I walked out of my office in lower Manhattan; when I emerged from the subway in Brooklyn, the game had only just resumed. In between? Waiting and worrying and hoping.

You can see the collision here, and it will still make you flinch: the odd way Beltran comes to rest lying beside Cameron, on his stomach while Cameron’s on his back, his arm draped across his teammate’s chest, like some parody of friends snoozing in the sun at a picnic. How Beltran gets to his knees but can’t get to his feet for a long time. The alarm leaking from every little movement Marlon Anderson makes once he arrives at the scene. The arrival of the cart, supervised by Ray Ramirez and Willie Randolph. The relief that Cameron is moving and reacting as the cart bears him away.

(As always, baseball comes freighted with ironies: Beltran will have his number retired tomorrow. The guy who hit the ball? David Ross, who called Wednesday night’s game for ESPN and might be the Mets’ next manager. And in the post below, you might notice my musing about the perils of rooting for a player over the team — ah, recent events — and acknowledging Howie Rose’s baseline excellence.)

That 2005 collision was the byproduct of having one center fielder in center and another one in right, with years of baseball instinct telling each man to be the alpha dog on plays in the gap. It had happened before — fans of a certain age will remember George Theodore and Don Hahn colliding in 1973 — and, alas, it will happen again. Whenever I register that two center fielders have been deployed, I feel a little lump in my gut — I’ve felt it a few times this year with A.J. Ewing and Carson Benge, the self-described psychopaths, plying their trade. (And when Nick Morabito‘s got a glove on, the outfield features three bona fide center fielders.)

Thursday night’s collision didn’t have that dreadful “when, not if” air to it — it was the product of neither Nolan McLean nor Jared Young being quite sure what to do on a play that wasn’t inherently dangerous, reacting in the moment and having it all go wrong. But the impact came with the same reflexive hand up, a dismayed attempt at warding off what’s already happened; the same hushed aftermath; and the same sudden, jarring shift in context. In a moment you’d gone from “please don’t let us be no-hit by Aaron Nola” to looking for signs that Young was conscious.

The Beltran-Cameron collision came in the early days of this blog; I was on recap. Re-reading that post, I was struck by what’s changed and the ways we now do things differently. But I also noted how much felt exactly the same.

The worst 13 minutes of the season — worrying if Mike Cameron could move under his own power, worrying not just about a suddenly little thing like the rest of his season, but about his career and his life. It’s astonishing to realize that Cameron has a broken nose, multiple fractures of both cheekbones and a slight concussion and that somehow counts as good news.

[Take those 13 minutes out and you’d have a taut but frustrating loss: Castro dropping a perfect throw at home for the first run, Glavine giving up a two-out hit for the second (on a ball Beltran might well have caught), Offerman and Wright not able to bring Reyes home after a leadoff walk and steal. Take those 13 minutes out and we’d be worrying about Floyd’s knee and Roberto’s hand. (How’d he get to 40 without learning not to stick his pitching hand up on a comebacker?) Take those 13 minutes out and we’d grouse that given the numbers, Piazza should have been facing Trevor Hoffman instead of Castro.]

But you can’t take those 13 minutes out.

As fans we constantly run the risk of falling in love with people who wind up wearing our chosen laundry — players who may be taken away by trades or leave via free agency, or who may stay but lose their roles to other players who better fit what the team needs. Go too far down that road and you wind up rooting for the person first and the team second, when the very definition of team dictates that it has to be the other way around. But days like this are different. It’s not that we’re not allowed to worry about team things — if the players can go back out there after seeing Cammy carted off the field and attend to the player business of working counts and making pitches and all that, there’s no shame in our attending to the fan business of worrying (in a decidedly small-‘w’ way) about what Florida and Washington and Philadelphia and Houston will do. But the fan business comes, if it comes at all, after getting the latest report on Cameron. (And Carlos Beltran too, of course.) Tonight it’s the person to worry about first, and the team a distant second. Or third. Or tenth. Or not at all.

I heard the collision walking out of my office (Howie Rose never missed a beat even as the alarm leaked into his voice) and got home just in time to hear Randa step to the plate — not long in the workaday world, a frighteningly long time on a baseball field under the circumstances. I finally saw the replay after the game and felt my eyes involuntarily shut and my face twist into my shoulder.

Joshua saw it too, and saw my reaction, and stopped, staring at the TV. I had to tell him what happened, then explain it again. That they both dove for the ball. That they didn’t see each other. That it was an accident. That Carlos seemed OK but had cuts and bumps and had to stop playing. That Mike was going to the hospital where a lot of doctors could see if he’d been badly hurt, and if he had been they could help him. Then I had to explain it a third, fourth, fifth, sixth time. After the sixth time Joshua said, sensing I was getting weary of this, “I’m just worried about the Mets who got hurt.”

“So am I,” I said. “It’ll be OK.”

“Daddy,” he added after a moment, sounding oddly determined. “I don’t want you to do something where you could get badly hurt.”

I started to tell him that I wasn’t ever going to intentionally do anything where I could get badly hurt, but that accidents happen sometimes. Then I stopped. It wasn’t the time for that.

“I won’t,” I said.