Fans give Astros an earful of boos
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — George Springer could only stand there all alone and listen.
The Houston Astros leadoff man had no choice when he stepped into the batter's box a bit too early and was showered with loud boos Wednesday at an exhibition game against the Mets.
Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard turned and looked at the scoreboard clock that showed 1:09 p.m. — he waited for the minute to change so the game would officially reach the 1:10 start time, leaving Springer nowhere to go as the crowd heckled him.
“Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!” one Mets fan along the first-base side chanted at Springer.
The normal tranquility of a February game again was broken as a split squad of Astros continued the team's latest stop on their spring training tour of derisive boos and catcalls, the result of their exposed sign-steal scheme.
Two days after Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa and Yuli Gurriel got jeered for a game at Detroit's park in Lakeland, it was the Mets' turn to host at newly renovated Clover Park.
Vilified this offseason by the baseball world due to the their scam, the Astros brought a pedestrian lineup from their West Palm Beach complex to face the Mets. Springer and fellow outfielder Michael Brantley were the top Astros who started.
So it wasn't mainly the names on the back of the jerseys that angered the small mid-week crowd in attendance at the Mets' spruced-up ballpark, which had $57 million of renovations and additions put in starting a year ago.
It was the logo and colors worn by Houston, ironically a similar orange-and-blue color pattern to what the Mets wore.
Jim Masotti, a Connecticut native who lives in Port St. Lucie seven months of the year, sported a dark Yankees T-shirt and deplored the cheating scam. But he stopped short of saying the title should be stripped from the Astros.
“As a Yankees fan, it's extremely discouraging,” said Masotti, who followed Springer's career as a star at UConn. “I think it's a travesty for the integrity of baseball. What happened is something that may not go away for a while, unfortunately.”
After Springer worked a two-out walk in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 6 of the AL Championship Series in Houston last October, Altuve hit a walk-off homer off Yankees reliever Aroldis Chapman that sent the Astros to their second World Series in three years.
“The Yanks ended up being on the short end of this whole thing. As a Yankees fan, I'm very disappointed,” Masotti said.