He has been easy to overlook because of all the talent that has entered the room these past few weeks and months. David Wright and Travis d’Arnaud returned, to great fanfare. Yoenis Cespedes and Tyler Clippard arrived to great acclaim.
Yet it is Curtis Granderson who has been the steady, regular influence in the Mets’ lineup, at the top of the batting order. The one guy who was there in the heady peaks of April, the numbing days of early summer, and, lately, the resurgent excitement of a pennant-race September.
Quietly, Granderson is putting together a season worthy of the NL’s Comeback Player of the Year trophy, hitting .259 with 23 home runs and 61 RBIs through Friday, playing terrific defense, and giving the Mets a genuine presence in the lineup in almost every game they play.
“A very gratifying year for me so far,” Granderson said not long ago. “But not a satisfying one. Not yet. There are still things I — that we — want to accomplish.”
It’s a similar task for Granderson off the field, as well, for the project closest to his heart. Two years ago, Granderson donated $5 million of his own money to build the Curtis Granderson Stadium complex on the campus of his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago.
There are enough facilities — two indoor diamonds for small kids, a major-league-sized stadium, two fully-lit intramural fields and a softball facility — that 10,000 inner-city kids use the stadium year-round. And only partly to try to emulate Granderson, himself an inner-city kid who loved basketball but used baseball to chase his dreams.
“We don’t necessarily believe we’re going to find the next great baseball players by doing this, and that’s really not what this is about anyway,” Granderson says. “There are so many other things that bringing kids into baseball can accomplish. And those are things that we’ve already seen results for.”
Chief among these is bringing kids from Chicago’s vastly divergent neighborhoods together — “Black kids playing against Latin kids, Asian kids playing against white kids,” he says — who would never otherwise encounter each other.
“At one of my camps over the All-Star break, I had a kid come up to me and say, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a white kid before,’ ” Granderson says, “and he was 9 years old. In a city that’s still as segregated as Chicago is, it gives kids a chance to broaden what they know about.”
And also another advantage.
“A lot of these kids, the first time they walk onto the fields there, it’s the first time they’ve ever stepped on a college campus,” he says. “And you see kids who talk to each other and say, ‘Wow, this is what college looks like? This might be for me.’ Baseball can open so many doors — socially, scholastically — and that’s what we want to do. We want to open as many doors as possible, to as many kids as possible.”
Granderson’s great hope is that in the next few years he can convince MLB to create an Urban Youth Academy in Chicago, and to that end he has talked with the commissioner’s office, the Players Association, the White Sox and the Cubs. Los Angeles and Atlanta have such programs up and running already, and Granderson is hoping before long his hometown will be city No. 3.
And if that happens?
“Then anything is possible,” he says. “Kids will be excited about the game. They’ll want to pass that excitement on to friends and family, maybe get a great education because of the game. There’s so many possibilities.”
Whack Back at Vacc
Jeff Cohen: The Mets’ 8-7 comeback against Washington on Tuesday is this team’s “Black Cat” game. In ’69, it meant Goodbye, Cubbies — you’re cursed, we’re destined. In ’15, Goodbye, Nationals. Same deal.
Vac: What I like about this is how many Mets fans refuse to wallow in their negative history. Enjoying the precious present. Good for you.
Rocco Lobbato: The difference between Jacob deGrom and Matt Harvey: DeGrom is a thinking man’s pitcher and Harvey thinks with his wallet.
Jacob deGromPhoto: UPI
Vac: I believe deGrom would win the fan vote in a Nixon-in-’72-style landslide.
@powerhitter23: I’m 100 percent a Matt Harvey guy, but perhaps this shows him he’s not the island unto himself anymore. Fall in line.
@MikeVacc: That has been a lonely island this week, for sure.
Gary Ferrari: With all of the milestones he has passed during this entirely unpredictable season, could it be that it is not A-Rod wearing No. 13, but Joe Hardy?
Vac: I don’t think it would be hard to convince anyone that Alex is unfamiliar with making deals with the devil.
Vac Whacks
I don’t think the Patriots did anything funny with the Steelers’ head sets Thursday night, I really don’t. But the Pats forever forfeited the right to act like wrongly accused victims the moment they copped to SpyGate. Sorry. Nobody probably much trusted Willie Sutton around their wallets much after a while either, right?
Ed BurnsPhoto: Getty Images
If you haven’t gotten there yet, it’s time to join in on the fun with “Public Morals,” which is just about as good as the law allows on TV. Kudos to Eddie Burns, who has delivered a masterpiece of time and place that would make the folks at “Mad Men” stand up and applaud.
What happened with Mark Teixeira’s leg was nobody’s fault, of course. It happens. But do you get the sense if he were in the employ of New York’s other baseball team and this happened the way it happened, everyone would accept it in such Zen-like fashion?
Would it really be the worst thing in the world if Ryan Fitzpatrick took this opportunity and ran with it, 1998-Vinny-Testaverde-style?
