Up-and-Down Mets Might Have to Face the Music

By GEORGE VECSEY
Sports of The Times
July 12, 2007

Lose the choreography. That’s my advice for the Mets as they resume the season this evening at home. Dial back the frivolity a notch or two.

While playing erratically the first half of the season, the Mets demonstrated more dance steps than necessary, as if they were already cruising along Broadway with confetti fluttering in the November air. One sniff of the humid air should serve as a reminder that it is still very much midsummer, and these Mets have not won anything important yet.

The Yankees, on the other hand, could use a bit of strut as they return to action on the road against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Yankees look like an outfit with an identity crisis, waiting to see if they can get back into the wild-card race. They could use a bit of the dash exhibited by the Mets — but not too much. José Reyes could take a lesson from Derek Jeter rather than the other way around.

Last week the Mets sailed into the dangerous Giambi Straits or Pérez Shoals, where rallies are shipwrecked on the mental rocks. Reyes, a solid citizen who almost always hustles, neglected to run out a dribbler that he assumed was staying foul. To his embarrassment, the third baseman could have walked the fair ball to first base. Manager Willie Randolph then gave Reyes the rest of the game off, to think about it.

Yanked. That’s the verb one Yankees fan used to describe what Randolph did. The manager Yanked Reyes — with a capital Y — as a reminder that his old Yankees were expected to play hard, and so are his current Mets.

This is a lesson all athletes in every sport need to have reinforced these days, in an age of reality shows and amateur videos in which everybody gets to be a superstar, or is humiliated, or both. Athletes watch themselves on the jumbo message board. Ballplayers choose their own theme music to be played while they are adjusting themselves in the batter’s box. And now the Mets have a dance for every occasion — intricate little steps performed in plain view, out in front of the dugout, where fans and opposing players can see it.

“Reyes and Delgado ought to appear as a couple on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ ” wrote my favorite Yankees fan, Eastside Al.

Reyes is only 24, disciplined enough and good enough to create a run leading off the All-Star Game on Tuesday night. I don’t think his elders are doing him any favors by participating in these little demonstrations in front of the dugout. Of course, old Bob Gibson would have known how to deal with these little terpsichorean outbursts.

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This Mets team is still evolving, and not necessarily for the better. Last year’s romp ended with a seventh-game loss to the Cardinals in the League Championship Series. This is a different year, marked by injuries to pitchers and three left fielders. (Is that a record for mishaps at one position?)

The Mets have no guarantee the Braves and the Phillies will not catch them. What they need now is leadership, particularly from Carlos Delgado, the veteran first baseman who is only beginning to hit.

In the town where curtain calls took hold, it can be cute on occasion to see Delgado frolic with the youthful Reyes and David Wright, but what the Mets need now is for Delgado and some of the other old heads to tone down the giddiness. Perhaps Rickey Henderson, the newest addition to the coaching staff and Reyes’s spring training mentor, can make a difference.

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But nonchalance needs to be nipped in the bud, the way Gil Hodges did in 1969 when he trudged out to left field to remove Cleon Jones, who had seemed a trifle sluggish chasing a base hit. Jones and his mates did not want the muscular Mr. Hodges mad at them — and they won the World Series two months later.

Other Mets teams went down with insouciance, like the boys of the late ’80s, who won exactly one championship. In the 2000 Series, Timo Pérez believed he saw Todd Zeile’s drive go over the left-field fence. By shifting into a joyous slower gear, Pérez was thrown out at home — costing a run and, who knows, maybe the Series.

No Oakland fan will ever forget the brain lock of Jeremy Giambi when he declined to slide home while the A’s had a chance to eliminate the Yankees in the 2001 postseason. You know where this one is leading. Jeter swooped in from nowhere to retrieve the wayward ball and flip it home to retire the hapless Giambi.

Jeter, needless to say, does not perform dance steps in public, preferring to pump his fist on occasion, which is totally acceptable. This Yankees team could still go either way. Alex Rodriguez could continue his monster season — and then choose to move on, leaving the Yankees to totally rebuild, from the front office to the dugout to the field.

Whatever happens in the Bronx, Jeter should be a role model for the young shortstop across the bridge. Just keep running, or else those dance steps blend into all the foolish homemade videos, in which everybody is a superstar in his own head. Just keep running, right into late October.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com