PORT ST. LUCIE — On a day like this in Mets camp, my kingdom for truth serum:
“Hey, Jay, welcome back! We couldn’t trade you for so much as an E-ZPass tag, so here you are!”
“Hey, great to see you! New York ranked far down my wish list last summer, and now I’m aboard for a full ride!”
In professional sports particularly, urgency sometimes drives teams to ultimately regretful destinations. You act aggressively knowing darn well your customers will go ballistic if you opt for the conservative route instead.
When that aggressiveness pays off better than you ever could have imagined, you get the magic of Yoenis Cespedes. More often, though, you get awkward situations like Jay Bruce, the polite lightning rod, preparing to play right field for the 2017 Mets.
Bruce and the Mets have a chance to straighten out this awkwardness. They also have a chance to make it worse.
“I refuse to be a distraction in the clubhouse,” Bruce said Thursday, before he worked out with some other early-reporting position players at Tradition Field. “I’m here, and I’m happy to be here. I’m here until I’m not.”
“You look at his numbers, he’s a much, much better player than what he showed the first month that he was [a Met],” Terry Collins said. “I think he’ll relax, and we’re going to see what we thought we were going to get.”
The Mets acquired the proven slugger from the Reds on Aug. 1, the day of the non-waivers trade deadline, for infield prospect Dilson Herrera and minor league lefty Max Wotell. Had the Mets done nothing, with their offense besieged by injuries and underperformance, they would’ve gotten justifiably crushed.
After Bruce slashed a paltry .219/.294/.391 rate in 50 games, the Mets exercised his $13 million team option, with the thinking he would serve as insurance against the free agent Cespedes going elsewhere — and if Cespedes returned, a trade market would exist for Bruce’s services. Had the Mets bought out Bruce’s option for $1 million, they would’ve gotten justifiably criticized.
Upon Cespedes’ return, that trade market never emerged, not with the free-agent outfield market jammed. So the Mets decided to stick with Bruce at the short-term expense of still-promising youngster Michael Conforto, a move that infuriated a large segment of Mets fans while pleasing old-school types who tend to value RBIs more than WAR.
“I told him today, ‘Hey, go play,’ ” Collins said of Bruce, who totaled 33 homers last year and has hit 30 or more four times. “I think he will. This guy’s a quality, veteran guy. This is not his first rodeo.”
The rodeo veteran cruised through his news conference Thursday. He vowed, “There’s obviously a lot more there” than what he showed as a Met last year. He expressed a willingness, if not any desire, to take grounders at first base. He theorized that the midseason adjustment to a new team and city, his first career trade, contributed to his horrid 2016 showing, though he stressed twice that such a transition didn’t excuse the numbers.
Bruce even extended an olive branch of sorts to his haters.
“Obviously, coming here to a fan base full of passionate, kind of ‘What have you done for me lately?’ fans, I can understand the frustration,” he said. “But in the same breath, I didn’t really concern myself with what the fans were thinking, or whatever.”
The dilemma for the Mets goes like this: Their best outfield features the quartet of Cespedes, Conforto, Curtis Granderson and Juan Lagares sharing the three spots and producing at their respective ceilings. The presence of Bruce, whose value comes almost solely from his power, prevents an activation of that scenario.
But Lagares is injury-prone, and Conforto’s disappointing showing last year compelled the Mets to trade for Bruce in the first place. As Bruce said Thursday, “Having too many is way better than having not enough.” In his last eight games last season, he went deep four times and slashed .480/.536/1.000, showing a positive glimpse of his streaky nature.
“We’ve got so far to go that a lot of things are going to happen in the next seven weeks,” Collins said.
Perhaps a mishap will render this dilemma moot. Or maybe Conforto will rake in Grapefruit League action and get rewarded with a ticket to Triple-A Las Vegas.
The Mets wish they didn’t face this Bruce bind. They do, though, so an already intriguing season becomes unnecessarily more compelling. That’s the truth.