MIAMI – Brian Schneider didn’t know anything was wrong, because he was busy doing his job. Matt Treanor, the Marlins’ catcher, had topped a ball to third. Schneider trailed Treanor down the basepath, backing up the play in case of a stray throw.
“It was a routine play,” the Mets catcher would say a few hours later. “Then I look up and it was, ‘Uh-oh. Something’s wrong.’ ”
From 1-and-0 to uh-oh. That’s how quickly a baseball team can be turned upside-down. In the blink of an eye – or the pop of a hamstring – a smooth ride on glassy water can turn into an imperfect storm on open seas.
Especially if that popped hamstring happens to belong to Pedro Martinez.
“He felt a twinge,” Willie Randolph said when this 5-4, 10-inning loss was complete, inside a clubhouse that felt way too quiet and way too somber for the second day of the season. “That’s not always good.”
The preliminary diagnosis was a strain, but that’s all guesswork until today, when Martinez visits the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and gets an MRI that’ll reveal a broader picture of what’s to come.
Hamstrings are funny things. They can heal quickly or they can linger for months. And for a pitcher coming off major arm surgery, there can be nothing but a conservative timetable, no matter what the doctors see.
“We’ll wait to hear what the doctors say,” Randolph said. “And we’ll go on from there. We’ve had injuries to deal with ever since I’ve been here. This is no different.”
But it is different, and Randolph has to know that. Martinez no longer is the ace of the staff or the foundation around which the team is built, but he still was supposed to be a significant element of what the Mets hoped to do this year. A healthy and effective Pedro in the No. 2 slot in the rotation would take a substantial burden off Johan Santana ahead of him, and Oliver Perez and John Maine behind him. This was a well-developed plan.
And last night was merely a memento, a chilling reminder, of just how fickle, and how random, baseball can be. The Mets had all but wrapped Pedro in protective plastic all spring training, allowing him to set his own hours, work according to his own schedule, follow his own plan. It seemed to work fine. He looked sharp in Port St. Lucie, said he felt great, looked great.
But even before landing all wrong on his leg in the bottom of the fourth inning, there were red flags flying all around Dolphin Stadium. His hamstring popped more often than his fastball did.
Dan Uggla and 76-year-old Luis Gonzalez clubbed homers off him, and Hanley Ramirez added a screaming RBI triple. It was 4-0 before Martinez broke a sweat, even if the Mets had gotten it back to 4-3 before hammy popped.
“It was just location, more than anything,” Schneider explained. “The shame of it is it looked like he was just starting to get into a rhythm when he got hurt.”
That’s what was easy to forget later on, after Martinez hobbled away from the ballpark, described by SNY reporter Kevin Burkhardt as “visibly distraught.” It was easy to forget how vulnerable Martinez looked when he was healthy. All during his mostly feel-good September comeback last year, he had managed to somehow retain most of his old magic powers, bobbing and weaving, hitting his spots perfectly.
There is no doubt he’s capable of doing that still, when healthy. But if the Marlins – a free-swinging, free-thinking club – can treat Pedro’s stuff like BP, it does make you wonder what the Braves and Phillies would be capable of doing to it.
Of course, for now, that’s a moot point. For now, in what’s become a familiar routine, the Mets will learn to live life without Pedro again, they’ll move everyone up in the rotation, bring someone up from New Orleans to fill it out, and they will be less of a team, already, than the one that broke camp less than 72 hours ago.
It can happen that quickly, that suddenly. One-and-oh one minute. Uh-oh the next.