A nice player.

Is there anything more deflating than being reassured by a non-Mets fan that David Wright was a nice player? They say gaining different perspectives is enriching, but I’d rather spend the rest of my existence with my head buried in the sand, deaf to how people who didn’t cheer for Wright or the Mets, feel about him. You don’t get to tell me he was a “nice player.” I get to tell you he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer before the universe robbed him of a career Back 9. That he was a mensch of the highest order. That I’ve spent half of my life staking my emotions to him and his performance, which is too long for anyone to refer to him as a “nice player” and not an all-time great.

“Man. Do you know the worst part about all this?” I’d ask them rhetorically. “Wright posted his career-best OPS + of 156 in 2013, his age-30 season. Some great years were still to come. He was already fighting through injuries, sure, but he still played in 134 games the following season and was two years away from the spinal stenosis diagnosis that would signal the beginning of the end of his career.”

“By all accounts, the house lights were flickering in 2013 and Act 2 was starting,” I’d continue in what’s inexplicably turned into a theater metaphor. “And while it was going to be more awkwardly paced and feature fewer showstopping numbers than Act 1, it would be a worthy piece of the whole David Wright Show.”

But of course, that’s not how it went and that’s how we wound up here: with Wright retiring five years later at the age of 35 — having not played more than 40 games in a season since 2014 and sitting out the last two years entirely — to a chorus of “pretty good” and “nice player.”

The thing is, everything about the way David Wright is viewed by the 29 other fanbases and impartial viewers is true. He’s retiring as a pretty great, but not Hall-of-Fame-worthy player; as the greatest hitter in Mets history who could have amassed numbers worthy of making him one of the greatest hitters in MLB history if his body allowed. Just because we loved him more doesn’t make these things untrue. I’ve acquiesced to this objective reality, even if I haven’t quite gotten used to the fact that his career is indeed over.

And because Wright’s road doesn’t lead to Cooperstown, it’s time to reflect on perhaps the saddest, if not the most poetically Metsian layer to his retirement. When Wright signed a seven-year extension in 2012, it appeared the Mets would finally have a completist. Here was Wright, who was going to be an all-time great who would spend his career with the Mets, set every team record and inevitably land in the Hall of Fame. Here was our Chipper, our Jeter. Our Gwynn, Schmidt, Banks and Bench.

That it didn’t end like that could not be sadder. Or more appropriate. The Mets finally had a completist, and his body started decomposing as soon as he crossed the wrong side of 30.

It always seems to go this way with the team’s all-time greats. The greatest player in franchise history, Tom Seaver, was unceremoniously traded to the Reds after 11 seasons, three Cy Youngs, two pennants and one World Series, due to a salary dispute. (The Mets? Salary dispute? You don’t say.) Doc Gooden had an electric half-decade before drug issues irreversibly damaged his career. Darryl Strawberry had eight monster years before signing as a free agent with the Dodgers, where personal issues would envelop his career as well. Mike Piazza, on the other hand, already enjoyed seven monster years as a Dodger before being traded to the Mets (via the Marlins, of course). He joined Seaver as just the second player to don a Mets cap in Cooperstown, but the Dodgers may have the stronger claim to the best years of his career.

No such asterisk would be needed for Wright. In December 2012, it was clear he was going to be a Met for life, and undoubtedly the greatest Met of all time. He’d assure us that he wouldn’t just be the greatest Met by his numbers, but by his spirit too, earning just the fourth captainship in team history before the 2013 season. Save for the gigantic baseball for a head, he was Mr. Met — Mr. Met in a way that Piazza, and even Seaver for reasons much to his chagrin, were not. He loved this franchise and its fans, and the franchise and fans loved back five-fold.

That it was all set up to end so perfectly and magically, only for it to fall apart as his body did the same, feels like, in retrospect, the only possible outcome for us. For the Mets.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom after 2014, which weirdly gets sort of lost now. Wright came back in earnest next August and was an integral part of a team that won the NL pennant, finally checking a box in his career he fell painstakingly short of doing nine years prior. He hit a home run in his first World Series at-bat in Queens. I was there. It was awesome. He’ll get to play in one or two final games at Citi Field in front of his daughter and tens of thousands of adoring fans, and that will be awesome too.

I’m supremely sad Wright’s career is ending this way, but I’m also taking a strange sort of solace in it as a Mets fan. We lost Seaver to the Reds. We lost Doc to drugs. We lost sole claim of Piazza’s prime to the Dodgers. We lost David Wright to his back. The Mets are good at losing. Isn’t there a sort of twisted comfort to be taken in that?

Photo credit: Brad Penner – USA Today Sports

Except, of course, it was the “Har-vey’s Better!” game. And I was there with 26,000 other Mets fans, giving Matt Harvey my full-throated approval.

The disappointingly sparse crowd at Citi Field will have an “I was there when…” story for years to come. Harvey. Strasburg. Let’s do this.

— Jordan Rabinowitz (@JordanRab) April 19, 2013

Let’s rewind. Like I said, April 19, 2013 feels like yesterday, and simultaneously, a million years ago.

Harvey was only three starts deep into 2013 and 13 into his MLB career, but there was already enough evidence supporting the theory that his first duel with Nationals phenom Stephen Strasburg was a marquee event, the first of many between the divisional rivals to come. The game would clearly not be a referendum on which team was better (come on, the reigning NL East champions vs. the team starting Jordany Valdespin?) but could gauge which young hard-throwing righty was better destined for superstardom and generational dominance.

Strasburg had his electric 2010 debut and already a successful (if not overpowering) post-Tommy John season under his belt. But his first few starts in 2013 were inconsistent, whereas Harvey came into the night virtually unhittable. He’d allowed just six hits and two earned runs across 22 innings over his first three starts, striking out 25 and walking six. Nobody paid mind to Harvey’s small sample size. We just saw his stuff, and that stuff looked like it would confound hitters for years.

Everything started coming up Mets early, as they jumped to a 2-0 lead before Strasburg could get out of the first. Strasburg settled in, but Harvey sparkled in a way that was indistinguishable from so many of his starts that season (although by gamescore, it was actually just his 11th best start of the 26 he made that year). The tension of the ensuing pitchers’ duel was only compounded by news trickling into the ballpark of the manhunt in the Boston suburbs for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Not at all to conflate the real-world implications of the bombing earlier that week with a baseball game, but it’s hard not to remember the “Harvey’s Better” game and the capture of Tsarnaev as inextricably linked. The oncoming catharsis at Citi Field had as much to do with news of the latter appearing on the scoreboard, as anything Harvey did better than Strasburg.

Zeroes were traded until the sixth, when Davis and Duda both tattooed Strasburg for their first homers of the night. It was 4-0 Mets. Our guy was cruising and their guy had suddenly unraveled. Then it happened.

Even on that night, Harvey was only marginally better, not that anyone at Citi Field cared. The score was what it was and the present deserved to be celebrated.

Because the unfortunate news is that with five years of hindsight: No, Harvey is not better.

Harvey was better, on that night and during that season. His exploits earned him the All-Star Game start at Citi Field, and he finished his abbreviated year with a .0931 WHIP, 157 ERA+ and an MLB-leading 2.01 FIP — figures he has never come close to matching. To his credit, Strasburg finished the year with a 3.00 ERA and struck out nearly 200 batters, but 2013 Harvey was better. And April 19, 2013, Harvey was better.

But the totality of Harvey is not better than the totality of Strasburg, and with Tommy John and thoracic outlet surgeries permanently altering who Harvey is as a pitcher, it feels like the book on Harvey vs. Strasburg has been written. It’s hardly worth getting into the numbers (if only because focusing on Harvey’s post-2015 career is going to make you seriously depressed), but it’s evident Strasburg, when healthy, is one of the best pitchers in the National League. Harvey, since the start of 2016, is 9-18 with a 5.71 ERA and a 2.08 K/BB rate (among a slew of other uninspiring stats I could have picked out).

If the “Harvey’s Better!” game is anything, it’s the starkest, clearest lesson we have in the volatility and unpredictability of young arms. It feels like Harvey has already lived five careers, from projected mid-rotation starter, to the Dark Knight, to Comeback Player of the Year, to World Series hero-turned-goat, to an injury-riddled cautionary tale just trying to keep his rotation spot. Strasburg too never quite became the perennial Cy Young candidate many expected when he hit the cover of Sports Illustrated after striking out 22 in his first two career starts.

Life is unfair, and unfair most to the elbows and shoulders of people who throw baseballs 98 mph for a living. Harvey was better, but he’s not anymore.

Photo credit: Adam Hunger – USA Today Sports

Despite being famously amenable to change and not at all tethered to routine and familiarity, baseball fans are mad.

Perhaps it wasn’t the savviest move for MLB to tap its most perpetually aggrieved fanbase as the guinea pig for the Facebook experiment. Mets fans are better at getting angry than most, and are better at voicing that anger more loudly than all, though the anger is not uniform. The spectrum seems to span from the mildly inconvenienced to the inconsolably outraged. Some are just frustrated that they’ll have to take a few extra steps beyond flipping the channel to SNY before watching baseball (firing up the Apple TV or Chromecast is hard work, man). Others, who may have never bothered to ever create a Facebook account or use the Internet regularly, are understandably irate.

Some of the anger is justified, if only in this particular moment. People want to be able to watch baseball without having to fork their private data and information over to a company that has used said data for insidious means. Those who have never signed up for Facebook, gave it up a long time ago or relinquished it recently in light of current developments deserve to be able to watch baseball too. Wanting to protect your personal information and/or not be subsumed by an addictive platform should not inhibit you from watching Noah Syndergaard square off against Aaron Nola, and I’m sympathetic for this sect.

But resistance to technology for the sake of being resistant to technology, and maligning MLB for trying to integrate new platforms into its broadcast strategy, is missing the larger point.

As of this January, 214 million Americans were on Facebook, while young people are continuing to cut the cord faster than expected rates. I’m a 27-year-old with a cable subscription and, anecdotally, I’m a dying species. Many of my friends have happily stopped paying for cable, and I’ll bet my small social circle is representative of the larger societal trend. Young people are leaving cable, and where MLB is concerned, they’re no longer watching the local cable stations that have exclusive rights to an overwhelming majority of their product.

Marry this last notion with MLB’s current efforts to liven and freshen up its product for a young generation growing as fast as its collective attention span is shortening. We know about baseball’s inherent disadvantages to basketball, football and soccer when it comes to winning over Gen Z, and we know mound visit limits, pitch clocks, automatic intentional walks and extra-inning debauchery in the minors are all flawed, insubstantial means of appealing to young fans.

So why not embrace MLB airing games on a platform more popular with its most critically important demographic than cable? In a vacuum, MLB is taking a positive step by experimenting with new means of broadcasting for the sake of growing its young audience. I understand Facebook was an unsavory choice for many, and don’t discount people’s feelings about this particular social network affecting how they feel about their baseball being wrested away from their familiar cable station, and wonder if MLB partnering with Twitter or Amazon or a less toxic company would’ve elicited a more positive reaction.

I also get that it’s still very early in the season and Mets fans are thirsting for as much baseball as they can drink. And maybe you pay for MLB TV and don’t appreciate paying for a game you won’t get to watch on platform. But take the long view, if just for a second. It’s one game out of 162. It’s a weekday afternoon game, which means if you’re going to watch it, you’re one of a relative few. And above everything else, it’s MLB showing in earnest that it cares about its future, something that we should all be deeply invested in, because Mets games on Facebook are better than no Mets games at all.

Photo credit: Steve Mitchell – USA Today Sports