The Mets are dominating the Cardinals at the early stage…

Sure, there are still 160 games left, but if all goes well, the men at the front of the rotation will still have to put in about 65 more workdays between them. Sixty-five out of 365 wouldn't seem like much to ask for, except so much has been made about the fact that we know for certain that Tom Glavine is 41 years old, and we suspect that Orlando Hernandez is at least that old, but who care. El Duque knows how pitch and he could care less how old he is as long as he does his job every four days his manager gives him the ball.
Age is a recurring theme on these Mets, of course, and the subject always tends to start with Glavine and Hernandez - one a sure-fire Hall of Famer and one who might have been if he had managed to find his way to these shores on the proper side of his 30th birthday. It's simply hard to forget the fact that the Mets' top two starters, the anchors of the whole pitching staff, are a combined 82 years old. At least.
Glavine generally approaches this with his usual good humor. During spring training, he said, "If the worst thing somebody says about me this year is that I'm 41 years old, then I guess it will have been a pretty good year, right?"
El Duque's a bit more prickly about it, tires of people spending so much time pondering his age, making jokes about his birth certificate.
"I feel young," he said this spring. "I feel good. Shouldn't that be enough?"
If the majority of those 65 starts go the way the first two have, it certainly will be. On Sunday, Glavine turned in six vintage innings, 89 pitches that yielded but one run. It seemed like a happy harbinger. It turned out to be just a warm-up act.
Because El Duque re-raised Glavine last night at Busch Stadium. He threw one extra inning. He threw 14 more pitches. If watching Glavine on Sunday night looked like an anthology of his finest work as a Brave, then Hernandez last night turned down the lights and cranked the reel-to-reel to display some of his finest work as a Yankee, from somewhere straight out of 1999 or so.
"I threw seven innings," he said, "and I threw every pitch, and I'm happy, and we won the game."
The final was 4-1, and it helped push the terrible events of October a little further back in the recesses of the Mets' collective memory. They were helped by some brutal Cardinals fielding and by the fact that El Duque, not content to helping out with just his arm, also picked up the offense by driving in half the runs with a two-out, sixth-inning double off Kip Wells.
The bat was mostly about comic relief, however. It is El Duque's arm that nourishes the Mets' soul, that stretches the possibilities of what the Mets may be capable of this year.
It's worth remembering that these are the Cardinals, too, the defending champions of the sport who have spent the season's first 72 hours in a marathon of self-congratulation. Hernandez made them look like the New York Knights in the days and weeks before Roy Hobbs showed up, two days after Glavine had made them look similarly feeble.
It's a small sample, the smallest sample possible. But it isn't a small sample drawn against the Washington Nationals (who just may be the team to take the Mets' 1962 ancestors off history's hook once and forever). Hernandez has always been a marvel, a jigsaw puzzle of different arm angles and varying velocities that never seem terribly impressive until you see him turn professional hitters into human corkscrews.