It is April 8 at Citi Field, where a sold-out crowd settles in, fingers crossed, hoping the Mets' era of bad luck has officially come to an end. Even with Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes on the DL (again), there is hope in the air, because Johan Santana is on the mound, Jason Bay is debuting and David Wright has fully recovered from the awful beaning he suffered from Matt Cain late last summer.
Or has he?
Josh Johnson will be the first of many National League pitchers looking for an answer. Sooner or later on Opening Day, the Marlins' ace will unleash an up-and-in fastball that'll test Wright's resolve.
The pitch will not be aimed at Wright's head. There'll be no intention to hit or hurt him. But Johnson -- like the rest of the National League -- needs to know if Wright can be pushed off the plate, even by an inch.
Again: If Wright is forced to shuffle his feet, it won't be because of any disrespect on Johnson's part. It'll merely be the due diligence of a major-league pitcher probing for a hitter's weakness, psychological or otherwise. Wright knows he still has to prove himself after the Aug. 15 episode with Cain, which hospitalized him with a concussion and placed him on the disabled list for two weeks.
Wright returned in September, but badly out of sync, and batting only .239 with one strikeout every three at-bats. Wright acknowledges it wasn't the story-book ending he'd been hoping for, but insists there were no emotional scars that hampered him.
Rather, Wright says, it was simple rust.
"I hadn't taken any swings in two weeks (on the DL), and all of a sudden I'm back out there," he said.
The Mets are satisfied that Wright has ironed out his problems this spring. Actually, they knew it the minute he walked through the clubhouse door at Tradition Field in Port St. Lucie. Wright was bigger, fitter and more imposing than at any time since he became a Met.
Obviously Wright had worked out like crazy, in part because so much had been made of his disappearing home run swing. The third baseman went from 33 HRs in 2008 to just 10 in 2009, one of the reasons the Mets were last in the majors with 95 HRs, the only team not to reach at least 100.
Wright has never been a fan of Citi's massive dimensions in the gaps, but its 1.057 park-factor, 12th in the majors, meant the structure itself wasn't the reason for his drop-off. Mostly, it's in Wright's head: He has no choice but to make peace with the reality that his sweet spot, the right-center gap, is 44 feet deeper at Citi than it was at Shea Stadium.
That's just one item on Wright's to-do list for 2010. The second is compensating for the combined absences of Reyes and Beltran. The third is forgetting Cain's fastball.
The truth, of course, is that all three challenges are stitched into the same fabric. Wright can't conquer Citi Field or pick up Reyes' and Beltran's load unless he's fully processed what happened to him seven months ago.
There's no point in asking Wright to forget about the beaning; no one fully escapes that kind of trauma. By September it was obvious that Wright's problems went deeper than timing. He was suffering from an understandable case of jitters, as his average dropped 67 points from the .306 he'd batted in August.
"I wouldn't call it fear, it was never really a genuine fear," Wright said recently. "It was more like a nervousness, trying to get past it so that I wouldn't think about it any more. Do I still think about it? Not really. But it's always in the back of everyone's mind that there are dangerous parts of playing ball. Things happen."
Danger is part of an athlete's life; Wright is correct about that. But a full-on beaning is reserved for only the unlucky few. That's why Wright can re-create the moment in harrowing detail -- he'd never been beaned in his entire career, starting in Little League.
In fact, until the last milliseconds before the ball hit him, Wright thought he could duck out of the way. But Cain's fastball hunted him like a predator. The count was 0-2 and after failing to put Wright away with outside-corner fastballs, decided to come up and in with 94-mph heat.
A little background: Wright had enjoyed enormous success against Cain, batting .444 in 21 career at-bats; five of his eight hits were for extra bases. Cain had previously plunked Wright on two separate occasions, which led some to believe there was tension between the two stars -- enough to escalate into a possible beaning.
Wright denied any such rift, and absolved Cain for what he called, "a total accident."
But that didn't make it any easier to accept what happened next. With the ball practically in his face, the final message from Wright's synapses was less panic than surrender.
"I realized I wasn't going to be able to get out of the way," he said. "At the point all I could do was brace myself and hope for the best."
Wright took the pitch directly on the part of the helmet that protected his temple. He hit the ground with a dead-cold thud, and although conscious, instantly feared the worst.
"I had a throbbing headache, like I could feel the pulsing in my head," he said. "I was kind of worried, because I was in shock. It was like, 'Where am I?'"
Cain subsequently called and texted his apologies to Wright. Two days later, when the Mets' star was released from the hospital and returned to the ballpark, Cain visited Wright in person.
All was forgiven between the two, but Wright isn't naïve enough to think the rest of the NL will pretend the accident didn't happen.
If March at-bats mean anything, Wright has moved on. But the real-time tests are coming, fastballs designed to make a beaning-survivor uncomfortable.
Wright might not like it, but that's the surcharge of the big-league life. As Michael Corleone once said: It's not personal. It's strictly business.
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