PORT ST. LUCIE — The sun ruled a cloudless blue sky, a gentle breeze blew, a smattering of pitchers thumped easy-does-it fastballs at a smattering of catchers, batting cages bristled with the snap-crackle-pop of hitters feasting on BP fatties.
Yes, it was an ordinary day on Florida’s Treasure Coast, the sights and sounds of spring training collaborating in the morning heat at Digital Domain Park, the wonderful routine-ness of it all instantly evident. And if ever a team needed this, needed the return of players to the clubhouse and drills to the field, to all of it, it’s the Mets.
You think you’ve had a long winter?
“It’s good to be here,” Jeff Wilpon said. “It’s good to be able to focus on baseball again. I think we’ve all waited just long enough.”
Everywhere, of course, there is evidence of the longest, hardest, harshest winter the Mets — or anyone else — has experienced for a while. Even as Wilpon spoke hopefully of moving forward — and defiantly of his family retaining control of the team and its future — he stood outside the office formerly occupied by Charlie Samuels, the equipment manager fired after getting caught up in a gambling scandal.
Over in one corner stood Francisco Rodriguez, the temperamental closer whose 2010 season ended with a punch to a Citi Field wall and a night in the stadium’s lock-up, whose confrontation with the father of his girlfriend added a figurative black eye to the team’s mid-summer collapse. In another corner stood Johan Santana, around whom the Mets were sure they’d built a perennial champion not long ago, looking fit and healthy everywhere but in his surgically rebuilt shoulder, which will keep him inactive until July at the earliest.
And in the morning papers scattered throughout the clubhouse were the latest tales of the Mets’ Madoff problem. This time, it was the bum himself issuing assurances that neither Fred Wilpon nor Sol Katz knew anything about his funny money games, which would mean a little more if it hadn’t come from a man who always viewed truth as a second language. Having Bernie Madoff as a character witness is about as valuable as all those bogus statements he used to send his investors every year.
“This is obviously a bit of a distraction, and I feel really bad for our family and for my dad and my uncle because this is unfounded criticism on them,” Wilpon said. “They’ve had years and years that they’ve been good citizens, good businessmen, and to attack them the way they’ve been attacked is really very unfair and unfounded.”
“We’re going to fight it,” he said of trustee Irving Picard’s attempt to recoup victims’ losses through the Mets’ parent company, “and we’re going to be victorious in the end.”
That is for Mario Cuomo to determine and for the lawyers to debate, and for the Wilpons it would be helpful if their baseball team could steal some of the headlines and much of the attention away from them, and so it was yesterday that the engines slowly regenerated, the program slowly rebooted.
Rodriguez spoke humbly and contritely, saying he’s eager to ask his teammates for forgiveness, saying, “I’ve learned that when you behave the way I did there are consequences.”
Manager Terry Collins spoke excitedly about how he’s carefully crafted the remarks he’ll make when he addresses his full squad in a couple of days, knowing how vital it is to his future — and to the team’s season — that he engages them from the jump. “Feb. 21,” he said, “is the biggest day of the season for me.”
As much as anything, though, the Mets embraced the return to routine that baseball always offers as a salve, its life-goes-on mantra.
For even on a day when Jose Reyes sounded more and more like a player eager to have a good year and cast his lot in free agency, that bit of uneasy news was drowned by the monsoon raining on Jupiter, half an hour to the south, where Albert Pujols officially took the Cardinals hostage.
And you know something?
If you’re the Mets, maybe it’s not so bad that somebody else had a bad day for a change.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com