The Most Exciting Player In Baseball

Today in Shea, Jose Reyes continued his very special weekend (yesterday's getting picked off second base being also very special) by nonchalantly throwing wide to first base with two outs in the seventh. Carlos Delgado didn't make a play that he probably could have, and as Melky Cabrera rounded first and made it second on the error, Reyes threw his glove to the ground like, oh, a spoiled Little League player.

He executed it with a full turn, which let the sunglasses and glove both fall in different directions. Fairly artistic, especially in the slow-motion HD that you'll be seeing it in, oh, the 2,000+ replays that the Lemur will probably be favoring you with.

Oliver Perez then continued his inexplicable mastery of the Yankees by getting Jose Molina to fly out to center, ending the inning. The YES cameras then spent the rest of the game looking inside the Mets' clubhouse to see if Delgado was going to take Reyes' head off. In the ninth, Billy Wagner gave up a leadoff hit to Derek Jeter, then wild pitched him to second, but kept A-Rod in the park on a fly ball to right. After a Posada groundout, Wagner froze Wilson Betemit with a called third strike, and the Mets won 3-1 to get to .500, and salvaged a split in their 4-game Subway Series.

(Oh, and nice Pravda Moment from the SNY postgame, which failed to show the hissy fit. Way to cover your assets, gentlemen.)

The Reyes Incident, of course, led the telecast team to spend the rest of the game talking about Reyes' immaturity, and whether or not Willie Randolph misses having a job, and all of the usual points that you'd make, including a snide jab as to how no one was comparing the Mets' left side of the infield to the Yankees' left side now. But as always, I'd like to see some numbers.

First off, the number 25. That's how old Reyes is, on the off chance that you want to just chalk this up to Oh, That Impetuous Youth. Secondly, the number 675 -- which is the number of games that Reyes has played in the major leagues. I'm thinking that this is the Jose Reyes that's the real guy, folks. Immaturity be damned.

Next, 840 -- which is the Reyes OPS for the year, with a little more slugging than his career norms. The on-base is at .355 -- still not great for a leadoff hitter, but more or less what he's done in the past three years, and with his steals and extra-base power, he gets himself into position to score a lot of runs. Delgado's .725 OPS is the lowest of his life as a regular baseball player. So on the grand scale of things, perhaps you give your talented young player a little leeway, especially on a hot day.

But there's also this. Delgado had 9 RBIs in the first of Friday's doubleheader, and the go-ahead home run in today's game. He's also the closest thing this Mets team has to a veteran leader, especially with Moises Alou more or less done; no one is expecting this kind of thing from, say, Carlos Beltran. The first baseman can more or less kill a shortstop if he's really got a mind to, not that I'm really expecting Delgado to spend his time exacting a grudge; right now, he's doing everything he can to just stay in the majors.

And finally, um, he does know that he plays in New York, right? How badly did he want to be on the back page of the tabloids, looking like this?