The space between Joey Gallo and David Wright

On Tuesday, in a crowded ballpark on a warm June afternoon, the Texas Rangers won the World Series, over and over and over again. Technically, the Rangers won nothing but a regular-season game, but I’m not trying to be flip. Joey Gallo came up and did exactly what he was supposed to do, hitting a 450-foot dinger that helped the Rangers win a baseball game. And when a prospect that good whispers a sentence of the future, you get to write the rest of the novel. The logical extension of Gallo’s night: All-Star games, awards, walk-off homers, more awards, and, sure, championships. Over and over again.

On Tuesday, in an unfamiliar ballpark on the other side of the country, the New York Mets had a bleak, dispiriting press conference. Injuries will always make sports worse until the medical nanobots save us all, but this press conference reminded us that injuries can do a lot more than ruin sports:

There’s no reason to compare Gallo and Wright, other than to mash up two of the more important baseball stories of the day, but I promise that I’m not going for omnibus coverage. The remote control in my brain spent about three hours flipping back and forth between “Gallo, hooray!” and “Aw, no, no, dammit, Wright,” and now I’m trying to work through it. This is more of a diary entry than analysis. Sorry.

One of my favorite things in the world, though, are debuts of top prospects. Before Billy Hamilton couldn’t hit, he was limitless. Every time he reached base, he demanded attention, and you were happy to give it to him. It’s still like that, but in the debut, you got to invent exactly what it would all mean. When Buster Posey was called up for the first time, the Giants’ cleanup hitter was a catcher with a .281 on-base percentage. It was the best possible scenario for a daydreaming fan, and that’s how Giants fans spent their entire September.

Gallo comes up at a time when the Rangers should be reeling. Players in the organization have suffered through sports- and life-altering injuries, both, and the progression from perennial pennant contender to last place was swift and brutally unfair. They’re not reeling, though. They’re over .500, a half-game away from a postseason berth with two-thirds of the season left. They’ve made the season interesting, and now they have this, this force of prospect nature who wasn’t supposed to be here, but might never go back down. While it’s possible, if not likely, that the Gallo story has at least one more detour in the minors, this is the perfect time for Rangers fans to ask one of the very best baseball questions: What if?

The Mets don’t get the right kind of what-if. They get a what-now?, primarily, considering they’re still just a half-game out of first. But they also get the wrong kinds of what-ifs. What if the Mets could have spent like a New York team should spend during Wright’s peak? What if they used Billy Wagner in the ninth instead of Aaron Heilman, or what if Carlos Beltran was looking for a curveball? There’s a sense that a window closed, that they were lucky to have a player as brilliant as Wright opening it that wide for that long, and they blew it.

And yet, while that might be a natural reaction, it’s also completely cynical. Even if Wright never got to lead a parade, he’s still in the middle of one of the better careers a third baseman has ever had. If he gets a couple more seasons, that doesn’t change. If he never plays another game, that doesn’t change. The odds are very, very, very, very good that Gallo will not have the career that Wright has enjoyed so far because that’s unlikely for any prospect. Instead of the sad what-ifs, it would feel better to remember the 30-homer seasons and the specific moments of brilliance, like when Wright won four games at Shea in the ninth over a two-month stretch.

Baseball is much, much better, though, at letting you create the future than it is at letting you appreciate the little things from the past. That’s why we go so wild for Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa, why Matt Harvey’s rookie year was a No. 1 hit and why Roy Oswalt’s career seems like an under-appreciated b-side if you don’t have the right perspective. Somehow, the what-ifs of prospects can feel better than the that-happeneds of historically significant players, even if those players lived out most of the best-case scenarios for any prospect.

Damn, this reads like a eulogy for Wright, but we’re not even sure he’ll be out for the season. The dream is still alive for Mets fans to have their cake (having been blessed to watch Wright’s career) and eat it too (getting him back for a deep, memorable postseason run). The Dodgers had one good hitter going into the 1988 World Series, and he was broken. That turned out OK.

Still, that was baseball on June 2, 2015. The limitless potential of one player, matched up against the career of another player who reached his potential, with the difference being that only one of them reminded us that time always wins. It’ll feel differently on both sides in a month, year, decade. We’ll get used to Gallo, and we won’t get to keep writing his story on our own. We’ll be able to look at and appreciate Wright more when he’s not surrounded by the what-nows of a contending team. For a day, though, the contrast was stark. It was the weirdest, most uplifting, dejecting day of baseball we’ve seen for a while.