PORT ST. LUCIE — This is nothing new, really, simply a lesson of law and leniency at least as old as the Codes of Hammurabi:
If you are a .319 hitter with pop and an electric glove, if you spent last season immersed in the conversation for the Most Valuable Player award in the American League, if you’re only 28 years old and your stock is still rising, you can “forget” to show up for camp on time. You can report a day late for your physical, apologize, and not have to hear a public syllable of stern dissent or disapproval from anyone. It’s good to be Robinson Cano.
If you are a .235 hitter with zero power and declining range, if in the last three years you’ve been booed out of the lineup, dropped a pop-up that will be replayed to the end of time and declined to visit a veteran’s hospital, if your stock is plummeting like Blue Star Airlines at the end of “Wall Street,” you can report precisely on the date when you’re mandated to — and not a second late. And you can show up having read that your new manager really, really really would’ve liked you to have shown up earlier, and can already hear the boos.
It’s not so good to be Luis Castillo.
And hasn’t been for a while.
“I’m ready, and I feel like I can still play,” Castillo said yesterday after arriving at Digital Domain Park just after the sun did to take his physical. “I’ll give everything I have this spring training. I want to forget everything that happened last year and move on. I understand that. So that’s on me. If I don’t do my job, you have to do something. Like I said, I want to give everything I have in spring training.”
In many ways, Castillo has spent his career as a stone in Mets fans’ shoes. As a Marlin, there wasn’t a Mets pitcher who could ever figure out how to get him out. As a Met, he has never connected with those fans, he was kept out of the lineup at the end of 2008 essentially for his own good (remember Ramon Martinez in Game 162?), and he coughed up that Alex Rodriguez pop-up at Yankee Stadium.
The Mets haven’t released him, adding to Castillo’s public relations problem, since he now stands as a daily reminder (alongside Oliver Perez) to what is either the Mets’ reluctance or refusal to eat bad contracts.
It was probably a combination of all of this that led Collins to very public and frank responses the past few days when he was asked if he’d have preferred for Castillo to report early. David Wright has been here for weeks, Jose Reyes since pitchers and catchers came. Even Carlos Beltran, who has spent recent time in open warfare with the Wilpons, came a day earlier than he had to.
“He didn’t do anything wrong,” Collins said yesterday, clarifying his earlier position. “But I’m just selfish. I want my team here. And I want him to have a chance to compete.”
It turns out Castillo’s brother is facing “serious” surgery tomorrow, which he had declined to mention to Collins or anyone else, but the fact is this: Collins is right.
Castillo did nothing wrong. He reported on time. He didn’t misread a schedule, which was the excuse Cano was offering up 3 ½ hours west in Tampa.
In the same way many misread Castillo’s decision not to go to Walter Reed last year as some kind of agenda-driven snub — when what it was, mostly, was a poor choice in judgment and later words — this is no warning shot fired across a bow.
If anything, Castillo seems fully cognizant he is fighting for his career at age 35, that Daniel Murphy and Brad Emaus, even Justin Turner, could beat him out for a job, that the Mets seem far more likely to cut ties with him as opposed to Perez.
“I know what I need to do,” he said, “and I’ll do it.”
The one thing he can’t do — probably won’t ever do — is reverse the tide of public opinion. Not unless he reported to camp with Robinson Cano’s game tucked in his duffel bag.