Carlos Mendoza enters the Starbucks at precisely 10 a.m. on a bright Thursday in St. Lucie West, ready for his scheduled 10 a.m. interview with a reporter. Mendoza spends more than thirty minutes discussing his trip from Barquisimeto in northwest Venezuela to Flushing, Queens, and his first major-league managerial job while wearing an untucked light blue polo and jeans and sipping coffee. By the beginning of spring training, any early nerves he had under the microscope had vanished, and he is as at ease as he has ever been in larger gatherings with the media.
This was Mendoza’s prompt behavior throughout the spring, much to the satisfaction of players and staff. Everything—his meetings, press conferences, and club drills—started on schedule. During the final week of spring, Francisco Lindor stated, “Camp has been very flowy, and that’s good.” “You don’t feel hurried or like there’s a significant pause in between when you go from one station to the next.”
The New York Mets did not go through the kind of overt spring makeover that Buck Showalter brought with him when the clubhouse began to spiral out of control following a horrific season finale two years previous. Players in general found the spring as Lindor did, and talk about the new management was less prevalent now than it was back then. For Pete Alonso, it was “easygoing.”
That does not mean there is no change. Mendoza understands that he is new, that compared to Showalter he is unknown, that the fan base doesn’t know yet what to make of him. But none of this — this job, this responsibility, this spotlight — is coming too soon for the 44-year-old. To him, everything is on time.
“Look,” he said Wednesday at Citi Field, “this is something I’ve been dreaming my whole life, I’ve been preparing my whole life. I know I’m ready.”
It’s 3:40 p.m. on a weekday in Barquisimeto, and a young Carlos Mendoza is antsy to get to baseball practice. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, he recalls four decades later, he couldn’t wait until 3:40, because 3:40 was when his mom would drive him to a practice starting at 4 p.m. Mendoza can remember that feeling of anticipation for the sport he loves because he still feels it.
“That’s one of my best memories as a kid,” he says. “Hitting the baseball, running around the field, being with kids, throwing the ball. … It was being with my dad as my coach, my mom always in the stands with my sister.”
