Yes, life is easier for McNeill now than they were this time a year ago.
“I’m getting older, that’s for sure,” he said. “But I think I have a little baseball in front of me.”
Nine fans certainly hope so, and his teammates all say it’s true.
Of course, no one is commenting on the elephant sized invisible rabbit in the room—that being that McNeill is playing in s mini-platoon recently, sitting against the occasional tough left-hander in favor of taking advantage of back-up catcher Nate Wood’s superior defense behind the plate. Manager Bill Inkster has seen fit to give the superstar only 42 plate appearances against left-handers, though team insiders say they hope to see McNeill back to his full switch hitting ways soon. “He’s seeing some guys now,” one anonymous voice said. “everyone’s expecting he’ll ease back into it now that he’s hitting again.”
Instead of the elephantine invisible rabbit, though, what people are talking about is the fact that McNeill is back to being the high pressure hitter that folks remember him as. They mention he’s hitting .405 with runners in scoring position, for example, and that he’s .444 in the last three innings of games--.500 in extra innings. He’s been in 0-2 counts fifteen times this season, and come away with five hits, three of them homers.
“I’m feeling pretty dialed in now,” he says as he sips an iced tea and looks up at the departure board where it says the flight is delayed 20 minutes. “It feels good. I felt great in camp, but came into the cold weather and just couldn’t shake it out right, I guess. But it came back. You had to figure it would.”
No, Lucas, says the average fan. When you’re a Nine fan you don’t assume anything but losing baseball in October. And the fact is, you assume losing baseball anyway because while the team has always been good in the McNeill years, if you’re a True Nine Fan, you know it hasn’t always been like that. You know what you know, and you don’t assume jack is coming back except the long, dark losing road of despair.
But now Lucas McNeill seems to be back to the form the rest of the world is familiar with, perhaps Nine fans will be able to fold those memories up and put them behind them again. Lock them up in their tight little specimen jars and forget them.
For a while, anyway.
