Amazin' Avenue Mets Spring Training, Day One: February 21, 2013

Yesterday morning, I was out the door at 4:00 am to get to JFK and make it down for my first day at spring training in Port St. Lucie. Those of you who have been before already know this, but for those who haven't, it's about as relaxed of an atmosphere as you're going to get when it comes to the Mets.

Workouts started at about 10:30 in the morning thanks to an MLB Players Association meeting yesterday morning, and as you can see in the photos in the gallery below, the team starts with stretching and moves on to drills and practice. Between drills, players often shuffle from one field to another, and Terry Collins seemingly knows how to be in more than one place at the same time.

Grid View

After a day of mostly taking photos, I took a break for lunch and came back later in the day to see if any minor league players were still working out on the back fields. I wound up finding out about that from none other than Sandy Alderson, who was walking Buddy, his famous dog from Twitter.

Hansel Robles came up in our brief conversation because I had seen him throw live batting practice earlier in the day and remarked that he looked very good. Robles had been the only starting pitcher I saw in Brooklyn last year, and when I told Alderson that, he said it must have been a good start since he didn't have many bad ones, and he's definitely right, as evidenced by Robles's ridiculous stat line from last season: 1.11 ERA, 8.2 K/9, 1.2 BB/9.

I'm hoping to get more video today, but for now, enjoy this brief clip of Hansel Robles throwing live batting practice: