If you’re going to make mistakes as a baseball team, spring training is the time to make them. And with the Mets opening their spring training slate on Monday, their baserunning, to put it kindly, erred on the aggressive side.
After a lead-off hit to left, Brandon Nimmo took a hard turn around first, got caught too far off the bag and was thrown out at first.
In the fourth inning, Kevin Pillar ripped a ball to center and tried to stretch it into a double, but Starling Marte’s throw nailed him at second.
Surely not what manager Luis Rojas wanted to see, but he said following the game that being aggressive on the base paths has been a point of emphasis this spring.
“They were aggressive mistakes,” Rojas said. “They had a little thing going on with the team as far as pushing the envelope and going home-to-second on the first ball through the infield. They were all over Nimmo for hitting the brakes and going back and he got thrown out at first. Then Pillar just kept rolling and wanted to get there. It was a perfect throw by Marte.”
So no worries from Rojas, who doesn’t mind seeing outs on the bases in the spring as long as it’s drilling in the mindset to move up an extra 90 feet in the right situation.
“We’re just sending ourselves a message to be aggressive,” Rojas said. “We were real aggressive early and we’re going to adjust from there. It’s a good tone-setter as far as playing hard. The control part, the decision-making, we’ll keep talking about and evaluating throughout our camp.”
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