Mets’ Cespedes enjoying life at camp
A couple of weeks after a deadline deal sent Yoenis Cespedes to the New York Mets, the New York Post asked the Cuban-born outfielder about his first impressions of the city. He said, “It seems like the kind of place where you could either make yourself really big or make yourself really small.” Guess which one he picked? Tuesday, a few days after Cespedes’ streak of consecutive mornings arriving to training camp in an ostentatious new car ended at six, he rode into Mets camp on a beautiful buckskin horse named Candy, trotting alongside pitcher Noah Syndergaard — also on a horse — over muddy paths around the back fields in the Mets facility, past the practice mounds adjoining the stadium and into the players parking lot, where the pair dismounted and went inside to get ready for baseball practice.
Here are your 2016 Mets, the reigning National League champions, literally riding their high horses. Syndergaard and Cespedes, in particular, make perfect emblems of the club’s turn from punch line to powerhouse. Syndergaard is a giant, athletic, fireballing starter who knows it. He joined the Mets in the 2012 trade that sent R.A. Dickey to the Toronto Blue Jays, part of general manager Sandy Alderson’s effort to rebuild around a stable of young pitchers. Syndergaard plays the part with gusto, embracing his apt nickname, “Thor.”
But Cespedes, for a variety of reasons, draws about as much attention in spring as the Mets’ army of arms combined and represents a new and tantalizing product of the club’s success. The front office and owners insisted for years they had the financial flexibility to add payroll once the team looked fit to contend. With Cespedes on the open market this offseason, they did just that, signing the slugger to a three-year deal worth $75 million with an opt-out clause after the season.
Cespedes is the money and the glitz and the glamour of success in baseball’s biggest market. He is the man with the customized atbat music, sporting the personalized jewelry and neon-yellow accessories, rolling into camp in a Lamborghini that spits fire or, on Tuesday, bringing two horses down from his ranch about 30 miles north to make a particularly heroic entrance at Syndergaard’s behest.
“We play a game for a living; it’s supposed to be fun,” Syndergaard said of the stunt.
And for the Mets, set to open 2016 flush with lavish pitching riches and a deep lineup and a clear route back to the postseason, baseball must seem pretty fun. Spring training, in the early weeks before the exhibition schedule begins, fosters a strange sort of bubble over every camp, unsullied by the realities that come with all the injuries and in- adequacies that ensue.
Cespedes, who didn’t speak to the media Tuesday, fills up nearly the entirety of that bubble over Port St. Lucie these days.
“I don’t know how to put this politically, but he’s just doing it for the fun of it,” manager Terry Collins said Tuesday. “You guys get all stirred up by it — there’s nothing else to write about, so you’re writing about his cars. He does his drills, he works hard, he’s getting ready to play. He’s just having a good time. I guess he likes the attention that he’s getting and all that hoopla.”
All that hoopla, of course, almost guarantees backlash will follow. Cespedes, though not the best player on the Mets, is the team’s best paid — and perhaps most visible — star, and the particulars of that situation combined with his on- and off-field flamboyance mean as soon as he and the Mets struggle, he’ll face criticism.