Reese Kaplan -- It's Spring Training for the Rookie Manager, Too

It’s early in Spring Training and surely too soon to draw any definitive conclusions but early impressions of Mickey Callaway are indeed positive.  Granted, it’s his first ever camp and he’s seemingly giddy with the newness of it all.  Thus far, however, he’s showing people he’s a man of his word.

To wit, take a look at the recent situation with Dom Smith and his tardiness upon arrival to camp.  One of the biggest themes after communication coming from the new skipper is accountability.  It’s come up so often during his press interactions that it was beginning to sound like common refrains from managers of the past like, “We battled” or “We’ve got to get him going.”

Consequently, when Callaway penciled in the newly svelte Smith into the first Spring Training game lineup you would expect that he would be on pins and needles, perhaps even unable to sleep.  So the story goes that he indeed slept through the alarm clock and arrived late for the pre-game meeting.  As a result, Callaway benched him for the game and in doing so it taught the young Smith a harsh lesson which was plastered all over the media.

Unlike the grumpy and stubborn Bill Belichick, Callaway did not feel it was more important to make his point than to win the game.  Callaway had Smith back in the lineup after the one day of disciplinary action.  Smith looked like the smooth fielding and offensive producing player we’d heard about while in the minor leagues.

I watched a bit of Saturday’s game and saw something different when Callaway sprinted out to give a merciful hook to Kevin McGowan who was just having a very bad day.  He realized that it was more important to stop the bleeding as there would be other games, but he also let McGowan get some work in and try to power through it.  He wasn’t “Captain Hook” like we’ve seen in the recent past. 

My only possibly negative reaction to Callaway thus far is he seems a little too enamored of being in front of the cameras and the microphones.  There’s nothing wrong with connecting to the media and standing tall in the face of both success and adversity, but it’s quite another thing to get caught up in your own new-found celebrity status.  Hopefully, like the novelty of the first spring training fully in charge he will learn to not make himself the center of every story.  Then again, Bobby Valentine did that as well and he was a winner both with the Mets and for his career. 

It was truly heartwarming to see the games this weekend after the long, cold winter of what-if and will-they-or-won’t-they.  The season is still quite a ways off and many hard decisions will have to be made between now and then.  Hopefully Callaway lives up to his advance billing and indeed gets his players to believe in him.  That change alone should help propel the Mets back into contention.