I'd been hoping this would be the year I fell back in love with spring training, but so far it's not happening.
Spring training's a tease, and a tease that takes way too long to deliver nothing. Sure, that first day of pitchers and catchers is like a beacon from springtime. But it's a beacon from a very far-off springtime, one that chiefly reminds you of how far there is to go until anything matters. At this point of spring training everything is the same: Pitchers run fielding drills, coaches say how great everybody looks, GMs spin the off-season, managers spin the upcoming season, and none of it means anything. In a couple of weeks we'll emerge from this period of Utter Meaninglessness and come to the fork in the spring-training road where Boredom meets Despair. Boredom means a happy spring training, all of which are alike. Despair means an unhappy spring training, each of which is vile in its own way, whether it's Tommy John surgeries, outfielders hitting first basemen on Photo Day or ex-Yankees threatening restaurant workers. Either way, it'll be a slog to the finish line, which is really just the start.
Did I mention spring training takes way too long? As presently constructed, it's a relic of the era in which players spent the winter driving trucks or baling hay or selling suits. Today pitchers need to build up their arm strength, but your journeyman-est of journeymen utility infielders spent most of the offseason in the weight room. If I woke up to find myself running the baseball world, I'd have every team do a mid-February winter caravan to keep us all from hurling ourselves out office windows into the darkness of 5 pm, then open camps on March 1. Sounds like heresy now, but really it would be kinder.
Whew. One bit of news has penetrated my Fortress of Grumpitude so far: The Mets aren't appointing a captain. To which I say, Thank God.
Captaincies for baseball teams sound cool, but at least in the Mets' hands, they haven't been particularly good tidings for either the captain or the team. The high point was our first captain: Keith Hernandez, back in 1987. An unassailable choice: Keith was the quarterback of the infield, the smartest hitter on the team and the soul of the clubhouse (life after midnight and all), not to mention my favorite Met [1]. Or maybe it's just that my memories are rendered rose-colored by his cooler-than-cool 1988 baseball card [2]. That's a signature shot of Mex: Glove out at Wrigley, staring death at some hapless Cub hitter, the C on his clavicle just adding to his aura of badassness.
After that, though, things went south. Gary Carter was named co-captain, a move both unnecessary (co-captains?) and stinking of clubhouse politics. A Web search claims Mookie Wilson got a co-captaincy in 1989, which I don't recall but sure sounds like the kind of thing the Mets would have done back then. No offense to Mookie, but that's captaincy as a gold watch: Mookie would barely crack the Mendoza line for us in '89 and get exiled to Canada.
The C came back as adornment for John Franco in 2001, and again, this is one of those “no offense, but…” situations. Franco bled orange and blue, and he certainly had plenty of influence in the clubhouse and the organization, but something felt wrong about that C from the start. This was both captaincy as gold watch and an unwitting acknowledgment that something was going wrong for the Mets: veterans whispering in the ear of ownership, sedition against Bobby Valentine. And besides: a closer as captain? And one whose high-wire act drove Met fans insane?
So I agree with Willie — particularly when I read that if there were a Met captain, it'd be Tom Glavine. Really? I've come to feel warmly toward Glavine as The Eventual Met instead of The Manchurian Brave, but there's still something about him that's mildly off-putting, whether it's his diplomatically sneaky excuse-making [3] or his strangely bloodless, aloof presence on the mound. Maybe, as Willie's comments suggest, that's unfair to him and he does a lot of good in the clubhouse away from reporters' notebooks and TV cameras. Even so, can a captain be a pitcher? Isn't a captain someone you see out there barking to his teammates about defensive positioning, or looming in the batting order?
My pick for captain, if we had to have one, would be Paul Lo Duca, who brought a very Mex-like presence and boiling-over intensity [4] to the infield. (Heck, he's already got the nickname Captain Red-Ass.) Then again, your captain probably isn't somebody in a walk year of a contract.
Captain? Ain't happenin'. Let's call the whole thing off.