The 2019 season was the worst season of Edwin Diaz‘s career. He set career worsts in almost every category with the most alarming being in ERA, home run rate, and contact rate. This was a large reason why he set career worsts in categories like ERA+ and FIP. To sum up, Diaz was bad in 2019.

There were a number of reasons why including the change in the ball and Diaz’s admitted struggles dealing with New York. Of all the Mets players, Diaz is the one who probably needs to get off to a good start to avoid the boo birds from coming.

Well, in his first Spring outing, things did not go well. He needed 25 pitches to get through the inning, and he would take the loss after allowing two runs on three hits. Two of those hits went for extra bases with Aledmys Diaz and Dustin Garneau hitting RBI doubles off of him.

Seeing this happen, Mets fans should meet Diaz’s outing with a shrug and a yawn. That’s about as extreme an overreaction you should have.

After all, it happened on February 26. The 2020 season doesn’t begin for another month. That is a month for Diaz to continue to work with Jeremy Hefner to make the adjustments he needs to make in order to again become the dominant closer he was with the Seattle Mariners. It’s a month for Diaz to shake off the rust of the winter and proceed to striking out the side in regular season games which matter.

Look, this is Spring Training. Everything is a small sample size, and bad outings and struggles are going to be magnified. Really, it is incumbent upon you as a fan to determine how you react to these Spring Training outings and stories.

You could chose to be pessimistic about outings like Diaz’s. You could allow Ryan Cordell‘s big game or Daniel Zamora‘s dominating right-handed batters get you excited about the 2020 season. Or, you could just take everything with a grain of salt and await the beginning of the regular season.

You can choose to do what you like, but it is more fun to take some advice from Bing Crosby and “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative.” After all, nothing is on the line in Spring Training, so really choose to have fun by properly compartmentalizing Diaz’s poor outing while allowing yourself to get excited a bit by stories like Cordell or Zamora.