By the time 2026 rolled around I had a long-established relationship with spring training: I’d put the first televised game on my calendar, watch the initial 20 minutes with avid interest, watch the next 20 with vague attention, and then either be looking at my phone or asleep. And after that I’d wait for the actual season to arrive.
That was the plan going into this spring too, albeit with a side of perplexity about the 2026 Mets.
The Mets talked about improving their defense and then decided the way to do that was to ask Bo Bichette [1] and Jorge Polanco [2] to learn new positions.
They talked about building for long-term success and then imported a bunch of mercenaries and question marks: a guy they aren’t going to want when they’re still paying him (Marcus Semien), a guy who won’t be here in a year (Bichette), a guy who’s talked like he wants to stay but hasn’t inked anything to that effect (Freddy Peralta [3]), and a guy who’s gone from prospect to suspect before everyone’s eyes (Luis Robert Jr. [4])
They touted homegrown talent and then blocked Brett Baty [5] and Mark Vientos [6] before what are shaping up to be their make-or-break seasons, making vague noises that they’ll get enough ABs here and there and putting them on positional carousels of their own.
I think I know what David Stearns is up to and also why he doesn’t want to talk about it. I think the Mets are caught in between: confident in their next batches of position and pitching prospects but aware those guys are a year or two away. And so they’re trying to cover the gap with spackle, spit and hope.
And the thing is … it might work! The Phillies are older and the Braves are already riddled with injuries again. The mercenaries have large error bars — it’s not crazy to think Polanco, Robert and Semien all turn in good years. Nor is it crazy to imagine that Peralta decides to stay, that Bichette is Bichette (and maybe even likes New York), or that some of the prospects arrive a little early.
But it hasn’t been an inspiring place to be; I’ve spent more of the winter sighing and rolling my eyes than I have imagining good outcomes.
You know what should be the perfect antidote to all this purse-mouthed gloom? Going to spring training.
Over the winter, that plan went from “might be fun” to “OK let’s do it,” thanks to Emily’s reminders that she’d never been to spring training and would like that to change. (I’ve been ribbed more than once that I’m the rare male who was bullied into going to spring training by his wife.)
Once the plan took shape, I was a bit startled to realize I hadn’t been to a Mets spring training game since 1987.
Part of my surprise was understandable: I lived in St. Petersburg during the last four years of the Mets’ tenure there, when they shared Al Lang Stadium with the Cardinals. Back then I’d go pretty much as often as I could, getting my parents to drive me downtown, drop me off by the park and pick me up an hour after the game.
Spring training was a much more casual affair then. You could chat with visiting pitchers in the bullpen through a chain-link fence, an encounter that didn’t even require buying a ticket. Stan Musial [7] was a near-constant presence in the stands, leathery and cheerful in a variety of hideous sportcoats. Players crossed the sidewalk to and from the team bus in full game gear while on various errands. (I once slammed to a halt because I was dumbstruck by the arrival of Wally Backman [8] and so got spiked.)
Port St. Lucie? It was across a fair-sized state and may as well have been on the moon. It was also pretty much nowhere — in the late 1980s St. Petersburg was still derided as “God’s waiting room,” but it was the Left Bank compared with Port St. Lucie.
Once the Mets vamoosed, spring training became a TV pastime for me. It was also true that I was no longer enchanted by Grapefruit League baseball, partially because it was becoming big and expensive and brassy but mostly because I’d come to understand it didn’t really matter.
So you see why coming back took me a while. And yet there Emily and I were, at the midpoint of a wraparound weekend trip that took us from Jacksonville down to St. Augustine and on to St. Lucie and Clover Park.
[9]I was right about Port St. Lucie — it’s sprawl hacked out of scrub and swamp, a vague place in between other vague places — but wrong about Clover Park. It’s a tidy little stadium, well run and put together with admirable attention to Mets history.
At Clover Park the members of the Mets Hall of Fame get banners — and not just the likes of Tom Seaver [10] and Gary Carter [11] but also Johnny Murphy [12] and George Weiss. Seaver and Mike Piazza [13] and other beloved legends adorn the stadium walls. The exterior of Clover Field even pays homage to the confetti-like squares of long-ago Shea; I don’t miss Shea at all but still found this gesture genuinely touching.
[14]This is also the home of the St. Lucie Mets, and they have a terrific Road to the Show wall with little plaques denoted every St. Lucie Met’s matriculation as a big leaguer, whether that came as a Met or not — a feature I’m begging the Brooklyn Cyclones to filch for inside their own park.
There’s a lot of staff at Clover Park, and they’re genuinely friendly and helpful, whether supervising parking or helping direct visitors to seats or amenities — Emily brought in a pillow without having to endure a Talmudic dispute about its admissibility, and we surprised more than one staffer by asking permission to do various innocent things, which is what Citi Field does to a Mets fan. The food’s fine, and concessions are run with more cheer and efficiency than in Queens.
[15]And while the weather forecast was dire, game time arrived and there were actual Mets and Blue Jays down there on the field, including Francisco Lindor [16] making his spring-training debut. The Mets went out and lashed the Blue Jays, with Lindor looking fine at the plate and in the field, Semien crashing a long home run and balls coming off Francisco Alvarez [17]‘s bat with a sound that made me think, Hmm, could be a big year. Toronto’s Grant Rogers [18] wound up getting pulled from the game twice, an only-in-spring-training humiliation; it was bad but would have been a lot worse if not for multiple excellent plays in center by Daulton Varsho [19].
The weather limited itself to gloom and growls for an hour and a half or so, but then the meteorological gloves came off. We ate some ice cream out of a helmet while standing under cover, they called the game without much fuss or delay, and the Clover Park staff got us pointed out of the parking lot with brisk and admirable aplomb.
Not a full game, but it’s March and none of this matters anyway. In his postgame presser Lindor talked about checking all the boxes, and that’s the way I felt too: I sat in the sunshine, ate a hot dog and ice cream, drank a beer, and saw some baseball up close and personal.
My eyebrows are still raised about the Mets’ plan and whether that’s giving it too grand a name, but it was a day well spent.