Spring Training Voyage

I’m back from Spring Training, and it’s all too soon. I was having a lot of fun poking around Port St. Lucie and Digital Domain Park.  I took 500 pictures over three days, and captured images of many of our favorite, and less favorite, Mets players.  I watched road, home, and minor league games and saw players from the low minors to the cream of the crop doing all different kinds of baseball drills.  I met Amber Coyle, and Matthew Rose of NL East Chatter and The Real Dirty Mets Blog.

First, check out these two posts I put up last week involving Mets eating dinner and pictures from the St. Patrick’s Day game against the Red Sox and then click below to view more pictures.

 

I saw the starters (and Carrasco..hmm, long man favorite?) working on bunting, and then also pitchers working on wild pitches. They’d fake throw home, and then dash towards the plate yelling “One One One!!” field a throw from the catcher and swipe at the plate.

I saw minor leaguers rotating doing turns at second, and pitchers practicing backing up home or backing up third.

Minor leaguers practicing baserunning instincts: Teufel hits a ball, and they have to judge whether to advance or not from second base.

Valdespin acting as the guy that has to lug the basket of baseballs around and hand them to coaches to hit. Meija acting as the ball boy in a minor league game (literally going out to the umpire to hand him balls and picking up the balls that got by the catcher)

I saw Mets all over Port. St Lucie too, at Duffy’s, and Vine and Barley. Kai Gronauer, Scott Hairston, Justin Turner, Kirk Nieuwenhuis and unnamed players with him (Duda, Russ Adams?) not to mention the ones that I didn’t notice/recognize.  I saw tweets by Cory Vaughn that he was there with others, and we did spend some time speculating where the bigger starts like Wright and Reyes go to hang out.

 

The things I took away from the experience is that getting there at 9:30 to see the workouts on the back fields is a lot fun.  Vine and Barley is a great bar to get drinks at, as it has an extensive beer menu and 100 bottles of self-serve wine in which you can have a 1oz, 2oz, or 4oz glass of.

For the rest of the pictures from my trip, go here.

I also posted some pictures to Twitter as I was wandering around.  If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, go here.