"There but for the Grace of God..."

 

So, after last night's big Yankees win—and yes, EVERY Yankees win is a big win—I switched over to the Mets' channel, to see if they might still be on.

As it happened, of course, the Metsies had been rained thunder-storm-threatened out, and so they had a "Mets Classic" on instead.

Which baffled me at first. 

What was playing was a Mets-Pirates game from what the screen told me was "9/27/12."

I could not recall either franchise playing a significant game that season—certainly not so late on the calendar—and so I turned to the good people at baseball reference.

My memory has (not yet) given way completely. The 2012 Mets went 74-88, good for 4th place in the NL East, 24 games out of first. The Bucs were 79-83, good for fourth in the NL Central.

So why was this a "classic"?

Turned out, it was the day R.A. Dickey nailed down his 20th win on the season.

No disrespect here directed toward Dickey, a pitcher who overcame a seemingly insurmountable, physical handicap to become a major-league pitcher.

Dickey not only went 20-6 that year, but also led the NL in shutouts, complete games, and strikeouts, to win a well-deserved Cy Young.

The Mets traded him after the season, in a deal that brought them Noah Syndergaard from the Blue Jays. Dickey got a big new deal...and was a perfectly mediocre pitcher in the AL East. So it was win-win all around for us Yankees fans.

But what it also led me to realize, with a little shiver down my spine, is that this is the sort of thing that qualifies as a "Mets Classic."

SNY seems to own the rights to pathetically few big Mets games as it is...but there have also been pathetically few big Mets games over the many years. 

Much as we scream and holler about the inadequacies of HAL, Cooperstown Cashman, and the rest of our boys—and we have to, how else will they get better?—if just a few things in the Jujuverse had been a little different...any and all of us might have ended up rooting for the wrong team in town. We might be left with reliving the halcyon day of 9/27/12, when our feel-good story of a pitcher had his one shining moment...before we trucked him off to Canada.

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?