Freddy Peralta has faced just about everything in this league. Big spots, big lineups, long seasons. But this one was different, and you could see it before he even threw a pitch.

Peralta and the Tampa Bay Rays took down the New York Mets in his first time facing them since the trade brought him to the American League East, per MSN's report on the start. And if you know anything about how these first-game-against-your-old-team situations go, you know the emotions were doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I've written this before and I'll write it again: I care about the human, not the line score. Box scores don't have a column for what it feels like to stand on a mound staring at guys you spent years calling teammates, wearing a uniform that isn't the one you broke in. There's no stat for your chest being tight in the first inning.

Peralta handled it. He went out and gave the Rays what they needed and Tampa Bay came away with the win, which is the part that matters. The emotion didn't beat him. He used it.

These are the games I stay up too late for. Not the perfectly played ones, the weird ones. The revenge starts. The welcome-back nights where a crowd that used to cheer for you has to figure out how to feel. My buddy Dave on our desk would tell you to regress the start to the mean and not overreact to one outing, and he's right, he's always right, that's the annoying part about Dave. But regression doesn't explain the look on a guy's face when he gets through a big inning against the team that moved on from him.

Trades are strange things for players. Fans treat them like roster math, and front offices definitely do, but for the guy in the middle it's a moving truck and a new locker room and a whole identity shift in the span of a week. Then the schedule hands you your old life back and says here, pitch against it.

Peralta answered that about as well as you can.

Did you watch the start? Because I want to know if the fastball had a little extra on it or if I was just projecting. Asking for me.

The Rays got the win and Peralta got his moment, and Mets fans had to sit through the whole thing. Baseball does this to us every single year and it never gets old.