#Mets’ Brad Brach thankful family OK after coronavirus scare

Brad Brach arrived in New York ahead of spring training 2.0, went to Citi Field to get his intake COVID-19 test and then went for lunch.

He couldn’t taste his sandwich.

“My stomach kind of dropped,” he said.

The Mets reliever, who had previously just thought he had a cold, then realized what was coming — a positive test result — which forced him to miss the entire camp leading into Friday’s season opener. Brach’s wife, Jenae Cherry, who was late into her pregnancy, also tested positive, which added a scare to the situation.

But Brach finally returned to Citi Field on Saturday for the first time since, now that he, his wife and their new twin boys are all safe and healthy, after what the 34-year-old right-hander described as “pretty mild cases” of COVID-19.

“It was a tough couple weeks just because you don’t know how my wife’s going to react, how the boys are going to react to it,” Brach said Saturday afternoon on a Zoom call. “So it was a nerve-wracking time. Her biggest thing was that she wanted me to be there and we were hearing different things from the doctor that if I’m still testing positive, I can’t come. Or even if it was past 14 days, I couldn’t be there for the birth, so that was kind of the emotional roller-coaster I was on, more so than the baseball stuff because I knew that was going to be at least two or three weeks away.”

Brach was ultimately allowed to be at the hospital for the birth of his twins, then helped his wife “settle back into life with three kids now,” before leaving to rejoin the Mets.

The New Jersey native threw a bullpen session Saturday at Citi Field before the Mets’ 5-3 loss to the Braves and came out feeling better than he expected. He plans to throw another bullpen in the coming days, then face live hitters and reassess his status.

Fellow reliever Jared Hughes also rejoined the team sometime last week, manager Luis Rojas said, after also missing most of camp for an undisclosed reason. Rojas said Hughes is “a little bit ahead” of Brach in his buildup, but declined to put a timeline on either pitcher’s return. Both will provide the Mets with important bullpen depth whenever they are deemed ready.

Aside from his biggest COVID-19-related concern — the health of his family — Brach said it was frustrating not being able to continue his baseball training while he was sick. During his quarantine, he tried to stay sharp by throwing into a tube sock and throwing weighted balls in his hotel room. He later went to find parks where nobody was and threw his bag of baseballs into the fence, he said.

“More than anything I was just frustrated because these last four or five months have been like a roller-coaster of emotions,” he said. “You think the season’s going to be over, then you hear it’s going to start next week, then you think it’s going to be over again. So when we finally got the word that spring 2.0 was starting back up, you’re just excited to get back and be around the guys.

“It’s just frustrating more than anything else because me and Steve Matz and a few of the other guys in the Nashville area, we put a lot of work in to be ready. Then to have all that washed away here these last two or three weeks, it’s frustrating but I’m hoping the work I put in before then shows up in the next couple weeks.”