As the only team that trains in Port St. Lucie, Florida, the Mets have become somewhat limited in their options for springtime opponents. The nearest town with baseball is Jupiter, where, as it happens, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Miami Marlins share a facility.
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(Beltran and Reyes) will be fixtures on the other side of the diamond.
The Mets play 31 spring training games next year, including two on a split-squad day March 6, and roughly a third of them will come against those two teams. They will play the Marlins five times and they meet the Cardinals for six games.
via For the Mets at Spring Training, Reminders of Seasons Past – NYTimes.com.
There is a rumor going around that the Mets are looking for another team to share its spring training facility in PSL. I am not sure if it is a cost cutting measure or if they news four teams in the area to continue spring training on this coast
I think they really need at least one more team, ideally outside of the National League East – to make spring training on Florida’s East Coast more viable. Any cost savings would probably just be a bonus.
On the plus side, veterans rarely travel during spring training – you’ll only see those
“reminders of the past” half as often 🙂
They were talking about the Astros, but now that they are going to the AL West and have a new owner, they probably will move to AZ to spring train.
Another possibility are the Nats, but they are in the NL East and they want a new stadium built for them. They have already announced they are leaving Melbourne after the 2013 season.
Teams have outs in their leases if there are less than four teams on the East coast