When he took the job coaching the high school baseball team at Montverde Academy just outside Orlando, Fla., Tim Layden knew he had a top draft prospect on his roster. And when he showed up to fall workouts, he realized immediately why there was so much hype around Francisco Lindor.
How long did it take to know Lindor was special the first time Layden set eyes on him?
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“It was three ground balls,” Layden said by phone last week. “The first time I saw him play, it was, ‘OK yeah, he’s for real.’”
This week at Clover Park, the Mets will get their first up-close look at Lindor. The shortstop went through his physical on Sunday and worked out on one of the backfields later in the day. Monday is New York’s first full-squad workout.
“It’s just great to see him in the uniform,” manager Luis Rojas said, channeling the fan base.
👀 @Lindor12BC pic.twitter.com/ialwwaRIhb
— New York Mets (@Mets) February 21, 2021
As with Layden, it will not take long for Rojas, for his coaching staff, for Lindor’s new teammates and for the fan base as a whole to recognize Lindor’s remarkable talents. There are players whose skill sets sneak up on you, whom you appreciate more and more each day you see them.
Then there are the ones who make an instant and undeniable impression — the ones who take ground balls differently, the ones who catch the attention of scouts there to watch someone else, the ones who, in the words of New York team president Sandy Alderson in January, “make one smile.”
Finally, there are players who somehow contrive to do both, astonishing you initially yet fulfilling every promise of that potential and more.
That’s Francisco Lindor. The Mets and their fan base are about to be gobsmacked.
You remember where you were the first time you saw Francisco Lindor play baseball.
Mike Soper was sitting in the middle of four different baseball fields at Chain of Lakes Park in Winter Haven, Fla., at a high school tournament, the action surrounding him on each side. At the start of the day, Lindor was playing on the field directly behind Soper, then the Florida area scout for Cleveland. But as Soper gazed around, trying to catch a glimpse of everything going on, he became quickly transfixed by the sophomore shortstop he hadn’t seen before.
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“You zero in on a guy like that with his actions right away — the energy, the twitchiness of his body, the easy flow of everything he did. He stuck out within a minute,” Soper said by phone. “It was like, ‘Who’s this guy?’”
Soper learned the basics about Lindor, then 15 years old, and filed it away for the future. By the time Lindor was entering his senior year at Montverde, he wasn’t the only scout in Cleveland’s organization wowed by the shortstop’s potential.
For Brad Grant, Cleveland’s director of amateur scouting at the time, it was a summer showcase in Jupiter, Fla., with Lindor already in the organization’s sights as a possible first-round pick.
“He was a plus-plus defender and would be able to stay at short,” Grant said by phone. “There’s not a lot of times you can walk into a ballpark and say that on the amateur side, where you know for sure. That’s what stood out, that ability to play shortstop, the energy, the range, the vision, everything.”
Carlos Carrasco remembered the day Lindor came up to Cleveland in 2015 and the first thing he wanted to say to Lindor after watching him play: “You’re going to be a superstar.”
“And that’s what he is, always,” Carrasco said last month during his Mets introduction. “Always.”
New York third-base coach Gary DiSarcina was on the other side of it as a coach with the Angels and Red Sox early in Lindor’s career. Lindor’s energy and enthusiasm made a first impression on DiSarcina, but it was a 2017 game at Fenway Park that stuck in his mind.
“He made a couple nice plays that were above average, he got on base, he stole, he hit a home run in the ninth inning off of (Craig) Kimbrel (the other way) over the wall, and I remember thinking, ‘Dang, this guy beats you with his arm, his legs, his bat, and he’s doing it with a smile.’ It’s like Derek Jeter all over again.
“He’s going to kick your ass and smile at you.”
Although it took three ground balls for Layden to know the potential in his shortstop, it was over the course of Lindor’s senior year that he revealed his likelihood of reaching it all.
Layden saw his best player leading the way in every practice and the way his passion for the sport transferred to everyone else on the field. He stopped worrying about positioning his defenders for each different hitter; Lindor did it for him.
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“He didn’t need me,” Layden said. “He didn’t need a high school coach.”
And he saw how a 17-year-old, younger than most of the kids in his class let alone most of the other top prospects going in that year’s amateur draft, handled the pressure and stress of that season as if they were nothing at all.
“He was entirely unfazed,” Layden said. “The maturity level he displayed even at that stage — after that season you knew he was going to make it. It was just a matter of how quick he would be a big-league All-Star. He walked out of that high school at 17 years old, as close to major-league ready coming out of high school as any prospect in the last 20 or 30 years.”
“To be able to handle all that stood out the most,” Grant said. “Literally, you have a scout at your home every single night. You have them there watching every single game, watching every single move. … It was pretty impressive for him to keep that energy level, that smile and never have a bad day.”
“He’s always had the smile,” Soper said. “His passion and his love of the game just seep out of him. Those are the type of guys that are easy for us to put all our chips on the table and say, ‘Yeah, this is the guy I want.’ You can sleep at night knowing this guy is waking up every day and it’s 100 percent baseball, it’s focus, it’s passion for the game.”
DiSarcina noted that the trade to acquire Lindor was bittersweet for him; he’d spent so much time the past three years working with Amed Rosario, and he was excited about the continued growth of Andrés Giménez at short. But then he thought about his time in Anaheim getting to watch Mike Trout on a nightly basis, and he imagined what it would be like getting to work with such talent on the infield every day.
“He’s made me a better coach overnight,” DiSarcina joked. “This is going to be a fun ride.”
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“You feel the leader in there, you feel the experience,” said Rojas, who chatted with Lindor a bit on Sunday. “He likes to get involved, he likes to see what we need to work at, where we need to get better at. The experience of being a great teammate is what he’s bringing here as well — along with all the incredible tools.”
Layden’s originally from Long Island, a lifelong Mets fan himself. He’s giddy about watching the kid he knew at 17 anchoring his hometown team.
“It’s the greatest thing in the world,” he said. “A guy like this with this skill set, his personality, his approach, his respect for the game and his enthusiasm and passion for it, you can’t help but follow that. You’re naturally drawn to guys like that inside a clubhouse.
“It’s the best thing I’ve seen the organization do in my lifetime.”
(Photo: Mary Holt / USA Today)
