Mets may have hit jackpot with old soul Carlos Mendoza

This was early March, Port St.Lucie, a time in baseball when nothing seems impossible, when you can connect the dots all the way from spring to summer to autumn and believe every word of it.Carlos Mendoza was connecting dots.

He stood with a fungo bat in his hands in a narrow corridor inside Clover Park with a lifetime record as a major league manager of 0-0.He was replacing a manager (Buck Showalter) who’d worked 3,418 games.

He was the Mets’ preferred candidate over another manager (Craig Counsell) who’d managed 1,513 of them.Most rookie managers don’t talk the way Carlos Mendoza talked that day, as the rain fell outside at Clover.You’ve known youthful people who have “old souls?” Mendoza was an old-soul manager.

He talked like a man with a couple of thousand games already under his belt.“What I like,” he said, “is that I have a bunch of guys who want to be here, and a bunch of guys who want to play hard and play winning baseball every day.We all know there’s a right way and a wrong way to play this game, and these guys here, they’re all about the right way.”OK.

So your next question probably is: “What did you expect him to say? That we’re all excited to lose 105 ballgames this year?”And that’s fair.But the thing is, it wasn’t what he was saying that struck me later, after we’d shaken hands and I’d wished him luck with what was almost certainly going to be six months filled with growing pains and groaning fans.It was how he said it.It was the short exchanges he had with players running into the clubhouse to get out of the rain, the familiarity, the obvious respect.Francisco Lindor ambled over at one point, took one of the canes I use and playfully asked if I wanted to duel him with the other.

Mendoza joked, “Go get your own canes, old man!” and Lindor roared as he dashed down the hall.It reminded me of both Showalter and Joe Torre: the easy demeanor with which he carried himself, the obvious gravitas.And again: thi...