Palladino: Mets' Walker Off To Good Start, Cespedes Showing Signs
By Ernie Palladino
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Early season baseball is such a gas.
Unless your team is playing on the West Coast or in Arizona or Florida, it's not real baseball. The wet, frigid days cause weird things to happen. The hands sting on every ball fouled off. The expectant hitting heroes of June, July, and August often look like they haven't got a clue in April, while the supposed supporting cast rises quickly in the stats and the crowd's esteem.
The Mets are going through that right now. Assuming things go as planned -- never a guarantee -- the flavor will change soon enough and the world the first week created will flip itself.
It began its turn Sunday, albeit in a 5-2 loss to a Phillies team the Mets dominated last season.
Yoenis Cespedes finally broke out.
Until then, Neil Walker held Flushing's heart, while Cespedes hardly resembled the man who supposedly will lead Terry Collins' team to a repeat World Series appearance.
In fact, the fans grew downright ornery over the Cuban slugger's failure to advance two runners in scoring position during Saturday's three-strikeout performance in a 1-0 loss to Philadelphia.
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But with one great at-bat in the sixth inning Sunday, Cespedes at least started turning his reality around.
Heading into that game, Cespedes was 2-for-16 with seven strikeouts and nary an extra-base hit in sight. Plus, he had that horrible error in left in the season opener in Kansas City.
While Cespedes struggled, Walker had made himself quite comfortable in the first week, both at the plate and in the field.
Want to know where the double play combination of Walker and Asdrubal Cabrera is going? Saturday's nifty DP offered a glimpse. An effortless backhand toss to Cabrera, something rarely executed with such smoothness in the old Daniel Murphy-Wilmer Flores/Ruben Tejada alignment, enabled Cabrera's relay to get Cedric Hunter by a step to squelch the makings of a fifth-inning rally after Ryan Howard's homer.
Then he turned an easy double play to keep the Phillies from extending Sunday's 3-0 lead in the sixth.
Hunter, by the way, paid him back directly in the fifth inning Sunday with a diving catch off the second baseman's blooper in left.
What Walker had done at the plate helped a lot, too. He had the team's only home run before Cespedes hit his shot, and led the group with five RBI.
He drove in a seventh-inning run in Friday's 7-2 win when he stroked a single after chasing two bad pitches. That came batting righty. The previous inning, the switch-hitter knocked in a tie-breaking run as a lefty.
His homer Tuesday in Kansas City accounted for the Mets' total run production in a 2-0 victory.
The Mets brought Walker from Pittsburgh for Jon Niese to solidify the middle defense and add some oomph to the middle of the lineup. So far he's done that. But the sample is as small as the season is early, and Walker is not the one people expect to carry this team into October.
That honor, and the pressure that goes with it, belongs to Cespedes. And Sunday represented a major step in turning those expectations into reality.
Shrugging off the crowd's impatience with the struggles of this $75 million ballplayer the previous night, Cespedes worked through 10 of Jeremy Hellickson's pitches before the starter fed him a knee-high changeup on No. 11. Cespedes planted it deep in the left field grandstand to close the Phillies' gap to 3-2.
It didn't win them the game. It didn't even give them the lead. But the two-run shot off a fantastic at-bat broke the ice on a chilly afternoon.
After turning the first days of training camp into a sideshow complete with horse and three-wheeled rides and struggling through the first week, he began showing that the Mets may write a different offensive history than they did the first four months of 2015.
For Cespedes, the first week presented an early rough patch. For Walker, it produced a great first impression.
The final judgment for both men won't come for a long, long time.
But at least the struggles of Cespedes have started to abate.
Follow Ernie on Twitter at @ErniePalladino
