On the day in March when Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association settled on a new collective bargaining agreement, New York and national reporters, huddled in the lobby of the league offices in midtown Manhattan, scrambled to book travel. Spring training, indefinitely delayed by the lockout, was mere hours from opening, and nearly everyone wanted to be in Port St. Lucie, Florida: spring home of the New York Mets.
Months before, ahead of a certain work stoppage — the owners did, indeed, lock out the players as soon as the previous CBA expired — the Mets had emphatically debuted a new era.