When the Mets were stumbling and bumbling their way to a 5-13 start, Andy Martino of the Daily News infamously opened a game story with a paragraph heavy on "Blah blah blah" instead of rehashing the latest indignities.
He didn't offer a reprise after the Mets beat the Brewers 2-1 to kick off a 10-game road trip, but he could have. Instead of covering up errors and bad pitching, however, Martino would have saved himself from having to come up with new ways to describe what Jose Reyes means to this team.
It would go a little something like this: Blah blah blah pitcher's duel blah blah blah sputtering offense blah blah blah Jose Reyes blah blah blah triple blah blah blah rescues Mets once again.
Reyes's bat, legs and glove provided many of the exclamation points for the Mets on Tuesday night, once again making it impossible to imagine what life would be like in Flushing with someone else manning shortstop.
His seventh-inning triple plated both Mets runs to bail out their comatose offense, he flashed some leather in the field and, even if he screwed up by not sliding in a subsequent play at the plate, he was a major reason they won for the umpteenth time this season.
He wasn't the only reason. Chris Capuano pitched well and so did the bullpen in a game that was extremely well played on both sides.
It was, in fact, the kind of tight, dramatic contest that serves as a perfect advertisement for baseball at its best -- check out Carlos Gomez's robbery of Carlos Beltran -- right down to the spectacular performance by one of the most exciting players in the game.
Reyes now has an 11-game hitting streak and seems like he's on a quest to vindicate Fred Wilpon for claiming that he wasn't going to get Carl Crawford money.
He looks like he's deserving of even more coin, which would prove Wilpon correct in a slightly different way than he probably imagined when he was sounding off to the New Yorker.
Local
The Mets are now within two games of .500. They're probably a few more games away from getting everyone to start dreaming about what could happen over the rest of the season.
Thanks to Reyes, those dreams don't seem quite as wild as they probably should.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
