EVERY few minutes yesterday, on both of the city’s biggest ballfields, you could see workers tending to their knitting, caring for the great green patches even as the snow clouds roiled overhead.
You could close your eyes and dream about summer, even as the chill bruised your bones.
Or, you could open them as you listened to the baseball buzz suddenly filling our slushy streets.
And you could hear Carlos Beltran say at Shea Stadium, “I am looking forward to playing for the new Mets, turning things around, winning some ballgames for the great fans of New York.”
Or you could hear Randy Johnson say a few hours later, a few miles on the other side of the Triborough: “Every player should want to play a few seasons for a great team like the Yankees. It’s an honor. That’s the best way to describe it.”
For a few hours yesterday, January melted into June. Baseball bled through your turtleneck, all the way back into your heart, and you could feel alive again in the spirit of all the baseball season promises.
Especially this baseball season.
Especially in this baseball city.
In Queens, you had the hotshot kid named Beltran, eagerly asking to fill generational shoes left behind by the likes of Willie Mays and Duke Snider, men who played center field in other summers, for other New York National League teams.
“I know the history here,” Beltran said. “I embrace it.”
And up in The Bronx, you had the hot-headed old man named Johnson, whose snarling first hours as a New Yorker will quickly be forgotten if he treats American League hitters – particularly those from Boston – with the same temerity with which he treated a television cameraman Monday morning.
“It was unprofessional,” Johnson, the pinstriped penitent, conceded of his boorish behavior. “I feel very foolish to have acted that way. I hope to be bigger than that. I hope to be better than that.”
New York will grant him a mulligan. Yankee fans, they’ll forgive and forget, sooner rather than later in all likelihood, because theirs has been an empty winter following a vacant autumn, the memories of Red Sox celebrating in their baseball basilica still fresh and foul.
We always suspected the Yankees would conduct a day like this one, filling the Stadium Club with shrimp cocktail and toasted ravioli and plenty of pomp and pleasantries. What we might not have expected was for the Mets to join along, with chicken parm and cookies filling the Shea Diamond Club with a similar burst of gastronomic delight and summertime possibility.
But it worked. For one day, even a snowy day, it didn’t feel nearly as cold as the mercury said it was. Maybe that was a mirage. Or maybe it was just baseball.