This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Here’s Charles Curtis.
Let’s jump right in here: I really, really hope Edwin Diaz’s injury isn’t serious and that the pitcher will be OK.
In case you didn’t see, the star closer was on the field, celebrating with his Puerto Rico teammates after a huge upset of the Dominican Republic at the World Baseball Classic, sending Diaz’s team to the next round.
But as players jumped around, Diaz was injured, unable to put weight on his right leg. His brother, Alexis, was in tears as he watched Edwin carried off the field.
And as a lifelong Mets fan, I felt … exactly how you’d expect.
Well, maybe you wouldn’t expect it. I felt like this is what happens to the team I’ve rooted for since I was born. I was just four years old in 1986. Since then, I’ve grown up watching heartbreak after heartbreak, from that 1986 team breaking apart quickly to the doldrums of the mid-1990s to the team in the Bronx becoming a dynasty to Adam Wainwright’s devastating curveball to … the list goes on and on.
Just three months ago — which feels like EONS ago — I wrote in this space about Carlos Correa signing a giant contract with the franchise and said this:
As a lifelong suffering Mets fan, I feel like one of those people in those videos where they’ve just gotten their wisdom teeth taken out. Is this real life?
Because this doesn’t happen to the Mets. Never.
It turns out that doesn’t happen to the Mets, because then that deal fell apart and now I’m watching the team’s shutdown, reliable closer getting injured — sorry, Allen Iverson for paraphrasing this — not in a game but celebrating after a win.
The optimistic part of me wants to hope that it’s not a season-ending injury. That, if it is, deep-pocketed owner Steve Cohen will authorize the front office to do whatever it takes to acquire a dependable closer, which isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. I want to hope that Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer stay healthy themselves despite their advance ages for pitchers, that the lineup repeats what it did last year.
But then, we get back to the whole “being a Mets fan” thing. This is what we’ve signed up for. It’s nothing new.
Quick Hits: Aaron Rodgers wants to be a Jet! … March Madness begins! … and more.
— Now, it’s official, assuming a trade is agreed upon: Aaron Rodgers wants to be a New York Jet. The Jets had a great reaction. So did the (Winnipeg) Jets. A trade for the QB is hard to predict.
— Filling out a last-minute bracket? Here’s our March Madness cheat sheet before tip-off today.
— Gary Bettman thinks the NHL playoff format fans hate is “working well.”
— Zeke was both a great Cowboy and a cautionary tale, writes Christian D’Andrea.