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By the time I pulled into the complex at Clover Park for my sixth and final day of covering Mets Spring Training, the place felt almost civilized. No 6:00 a.m. cattle call. No players stumbling in before sunrise for picture day obligations. The press room didn’t open until 9:45. The clubhouse doors welcomed us at 10. It felt like baseball had hit the snooze button. And honestly, after a week of controlled chaos, it was kind of perfect. The room itself was quiet. Not tense qui

Spring Training has a rhythm to it. The crack of the bat. The thud of a fastball into leather. The hum of golf carts. And apparently… the gentle click of chess pieces. Day 5 began in the clubhouse, and what jumped out immediately had nothing to do with radar guns or exit velocity. It was Sean Manaea holding court with Jonah Tong, teaching him chess as if he were channeling Bobby Fischer rather than former Mets pitcher Jack Fisher. Manaea wasn’t just explaining moves. He was e

If Day 1 is about handshakes and fresh spikes in the clubhouse, Day 2 is where the tone starts to reveal itself. And the tone on this morning was set in the dugout. Steve Cohen met the media for 22 minutes, and if there was one word he kept circling back to, it was “excited.” But don’t confuse that with satisfied. “I feel like there’s a different energy here this year than last year,” Cohen said. “I don’t know what it is. It just feels really optimistic.” That optimism lives

There are certain sites and sounds in spring training that signal baseball is officially alive again, the pop of a fastball in a catcher’s mitt, the sound of a fungo bat, and the unmistakable cadence of a manager standing at a podium explaining, in calm baseball speak, why everything is both encouraging and cautiously monitored. On Friday, Carlos Mendoza stepped into that role, delivering a wide-ranging briefing that touched on pitching health, roster development, defensive p

There are a handful of rites of spring that never change. The sun comes up over the back fields, someone insists this is the best shape of their life, and reporters ask a newly arrived star how it feels to be somewhere new. On Thursday afternoon, that star was Bo Bichette the Mets’ freshly imported infielder with the family pedigree and an All-Star résumé, and now, a new glove destined for third base. And if you were expecting grand pronouncements, chest-thumping or a Power

Welcome back to Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing, our weekly stroll through Mets history, where we dust off the forgotten, squint at the overlooked, and remind ourselves that Mets lore is about far more than box scores and batting averages. The last couple of lessons wandered slightly off the basepaths. First, we tipped our cap to Kathy Kersch, Miss Rheingold 1962, the smiling face of the Mets’ first major sponsor and the most photogenic rookie of their inaugural se

Some transactions exist purely to help a Triple-A roster survive the dog days. Others exist to give a manager a spring training body who can play short, second, third, and probably sell peanuts if needed. And then there are the rare ones that exist almost entirely to poke the baseball gods in the ribs and say, remember 1969? The Mets’ minor-league agreement with Grae Kessinger, complete with a non-roster invitation to spring training, fits squarely into that last category. On