The Mets Are Apparently Charging Players $1,000 To Attend Offseason Workouts

Mets gonna Met. So here is how I understand this: The Mets are hosting non-mandatory workouts sponsored by some fucking meathead personal trainer down in Port St. Lucie. Technically you dont have to go, but if you’re a young kid trying to make the team or a guy like Dilson Herrara who want to train all year round in attempts to get better and make this club, you obviously dont really have a choice. And this Barwis guy – who was appointed to oversee all major league and minor league conditioning – charges $1,000 to participate and these poor minor league scrubs have gotta pay out of pocket.

If this is some personal trainer with no affiliation who landed a bunch of the Mets as clients, fine, no problem. But thats not what this is. The Mets say he’s just an independent contractor, but I dont see how you can call him that. If you have a press release saying hes involved in all conditioning hirings and supervises anything to do with Mets training, thats an employee in my books. They fired their old conditioning coach and brought this guy’s company in. We can argue over semantics here but that guy is 100% affiliated with the team. More so than just a random personal trainer, which is what they are trying to paint him as. So to me, its an appointed conditioning coach running workouts at their Spring Training facility, and the Mets are making their own players pay to participate. Thats low man. Real low. I have been on this blog highlighting the millions of instances where the Mets have been cheap, where they have been PR disasters, and where they constantly set themselves up for failure, but this is pretty low. Charging young players who want to practice and get better is as deplorable as it gets. Like hey guys we brought this new guy in house thats gonna help us tremendously! He’s great! You’ll get in great shape, take the next jump as a player. But you gotta pay a cover at the door. A Major League Ballclub who doesnt pick up the tab for their own guys to play baseball is just lame.

And everyone keeps saying that plenty of teams do this. Plenty of teams split the cost of off season training! But 2 things – 1) Like I said I think this is different because Barwis is clearly some type of in house guy. Its like charging the guys to get treatment after games and shit from your in house medical staff. 2) The Mets need to operate differently from every other ballclub because they’ve earned this “Cheap” tag from years of being penny pinching idiot assholes. How the Mets still dont try to get out in front of these things and STILL dont realize the media treats them differently and will take any opportunity to call them a joke franchise is beyond me. Pick up like a $10,000 tab and avoid this whole mess, you morons.