"Only time will tell..."You hear that all the time when you're watching television. A serious looking face comes on your screen and says something like "Will I be hit by a truck? Will a meteor hit the earth? Will Lindsay Lohan drink again? Only time will tell."
"Only time will tell" is the literary equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. "I have neither idea nor insight." So you understand how painful it is for me to type what I'm about to type:
Only time will tell (shudder) if Willie Harris is going to be a footnote in this 2007 season, or a thorn for all time. It depends on what the Braves and Mets do during the time that is left (and "time" isn't a nebulous throw away term...the time we're talking about here is a finite about of days and games left). Today, Willie Harris is their Endy Chavez. In time (you know, the time that will only tell), he may become our new Terry Pendleton.
Larry Jones is there already. And he, of course, was up to his old tricks, hitting a three run bomb (and I mean a flippin' bomb) off of John Maine which turned the game on its ear (it's amazing how when I see Jones play against others, the pain in his thumbs make him wince and grimace like he was David Wells at a vegan convention...but against the Mets all that pain seems to wash away like he's taking a Calgon bath or something.)
Mark Teixeira is getting there. Not only for his home run which followed Jones', but for prevention of a Luis Castillo RBI triple in the fifth inning...the same inning in which Fluff Castro popped up with the sacks full to end the inning...and how much more damaging than one run would that frame had been without Teixeira's diving play down the line? Yeah, he's getting there.
But it's always the one that you never expect. I was in the stands when Pendleton ripped my heart out of my chest and fed it to Tom Pagnozzi in front of everyone. I can absolutely tell you that I never saw it coming. The thought never entered my mind that Pendleton would hit a ball that crossed the plate at his ankles out of the ballpark. And it never entered my mind that Willie Harris would rob Carlos Delgado of the tying home run in the ninth. Never would I have thought he would have done that twice in the same game after robbing Moises Alou of a double in the first inning...again preventing a small inning to grow and blossom into a large one.
I wasn't in the stands for this one, although my cat probably would have wanted me there for all the soft objects turned into projectiles around Casametstra today. But that's the way it goes in the big city. One minute, Oscar Villareal's cab is taking him to Yankee Stadium, the next he's getting his first save on any level of professional baseball...against the Mets, of course. But that save was equal parts Larry, Tex, and Willie Harris. At 3.5 games ahead, the world isn't ending. The meteor isn't hitting anytime soon. Or has it already hit the Mets season...
"Only time will tell."
