You understood the emotion from the Mets and the Marlins last night in the aftermath of Jose Fernandez‘s death.  From the beginning, you saw Giancarlo Stanton as the emotional leader of the clubhouse.  You saw Dee Gordon swinging from his shoe tops. On the other side, Yoenis Cespedes was crying while embracing the Marlins players.  Bartolo Colon just didn’t have it on a night he would later saw he wished it was Fernandez who got the win.  You heard Travis d’Arnaud talking about how he got choked up watching the Marlins, Gordon specifically, crying on the field.

You could understand the Mets not knowing how to deal with the moment.  No one ever truly knows how to deal with death, and even fewer people deal with it well.  That’s assuming you can ever truly deal with the loss of a friend, a family member, or a respected competitor.  Eventually however, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you need to get back to your normal routine.  For the Mets, that is not just going out there and playing baseball.  No, that is going out there and beating up on a emotionally distraught team .500 baseball team that is no longer realistically in the hunt for a Wild Card spot.

It may sound cruel.  It may sound callous.  It may even seen unfeeling and disrespectful.  However, at some point, the Mets need to move on, and they need to get back to business as usual.  One to two days may not seem like a fair or realistic turnaround, but keep in mind, no one is rescheduling these games for a time when the Mets are emotionally capable of playing the Marlins.

No, the Mets have to go out there and put forth a better effort.  The Mets have to process their emotions better and just stick to playing baseball.  Yes, it’s hard, but that is what they are paid to do.  Better yet, that is how they can best honor Fernandez.  Fernandez was a guy that lived to beat up on the Mets.  In eight career starts, he was 3-0 against the Mets with a lifetime (boy does that word seem cruel right now) 1.34 ERA, 0.979 WHIP, and an 11.3 K/9.  He was this good against the Mets because he wanted to show the world that while the Mets had the heralded rotation of Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and Zack Wheeler, it was Fernandez that was the best pitcher in the NL East, perhaps all of baseball.

There wasn’t just a competitive drive to Fernandez.  There was a joy in the competition.  He didn’t just want to beat you; he wanted to beat you at your best.  The Mets weren’t at their best last night.  They need to be tonight.  They need to do it to win the Wild Card.  They need to do it to honor Fernandez.