There’s nothing quite like a New York sports fan in heat. This is that time. It’s summer. It’s warm. There’s nothing going on but the long slog of baseball season. The Yankees are punting on 2016. The Mets are in a downward spiral. And Yoenis Cespedes is now talk radio fodder.
The star center fielder went on the disabled list Wednesday after reaggravating his quad injury. He had hurt it three weeks earlier, but the Mets didn’t put him on the DL; they kept him on the roster. He missed some games, he didn’t hit well, and this was all inevitable.
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Except Cespedes played golf Wednesday morning. Kevin Millar even tweeted out a photo.
This is where bedlam breaks open and the poor guy working the phones at WFAN probably short-circuits because he can’t drink anything but Diet Coke to hydrate. The tabloids had their fun. “Scratched Golfer” said the New York Post.
This is all off the mark. It’s not like golfing leads to injuries. It’s just another log to throw on the hysteria fire. The Post‘s Mike Vaccaro wrote a column about the dueling battles of emotion and reason. It’s the juxtaposition of blind fervor and calm rationale that must make up his readership in some kind of ratio. Vaccaro writes:
“OK. Now let’s try to be rational about something: Golf isn’t to blame here.
“There’s no way to blame with certainty Cespedes’ golf addiction for the massive blow that greeted the end of the Mets’ 9-5 loss to the Yankees Wednesday night in The Bronx. Cespedes tweaked his nagging quad muscle in his final at-bat, bad enough that manager Terry Collins closed his postgame press conference with an oh-by-the-way announcement that Cespedes was finally landing on the 15-day disabled list.”
The “with certainty” qualification aside, this makes sense. But Vaccaro knows this isn’t the sole view of the base—and Mets fans are known to panic and coalesce behind irrational arguments.
“Man, this is a bad look. Man, this is a bad optic. Man, this is not the kind of stink bomb the Mets needed dropped in their clubhouse now as they try desperately to stay on the periphery of the wild-card race with all their fingernails.
“You can blame Cespedes for bad judgment without blaming his hobby for complicating his recovery. These are not mutually exclusive things.”
Maybe that’s what this is about. The Mets are in a tough place right now. They just swung a big trade deadline deal and are still slipping farther away from the postseason. Cespedes becomes an easy mark. He played golf last October before Game 4 of the NLCS and then hurt his shoulder later that night. Ipso facto heretofore vis a vis it’s cause for Mets fans to scream from the rooftops. The worst place to be right now? In the Twitter mentions of Mets beat writers.
Really, all this comes down to is the optics, which is about as craven a way to frame a story there is. If what Cespedes did actually was bad, they would come right out and say it, rather than saying it simply looks bad.
Cespedes can do what he wants. He’s probably been golfing before while playing with that bum quad. He definitely golfed several times a week while he was clubbing home runs damn near daily for the Mets last August and September. This time it became circumstantial evidence. In the end, it has come down to optics—the most inane argument there is in sports discourse.
