PORT ST. LUCIE — The bulletin board in the Mets’ clubhouse might have said it all Friday morning.
Attached to the corkboard where players check their daily workout assignments was a recent back page of The Post. The headline, conveying manager Terry Collins’ message to the 2016 Mets, blared: “Let’s Win It All!”
Collins soon was in an adjacent meeting room, addressing his team for the first time this season and hardly trying to downplay the Mets’ status as a club to beat in 2016.
“There’s going to be a lot of people after us, we get that,” Collins said he told his players. “I���m of the mind to embrace it as opposed to ignore it. You’re naive if you think for one second it’s not going to be in your face every day, so I think we have to embrace it and worry about getting ready.”
Collins and general manager Sandy Alderson both spoke at the meeting, which led into the Mets’ initial full-squad workout of spring training. Collins, by several accounts, brought the same “fiery” tone to the meeting room as in recent years, but this time he didn’t have to convince anyone the Mets can win.
And there is no whip needed on a team that won the NL pennant and returns just about all of its key pieces.
“The motivation that we went through with losing the World Series, you don’t need any more motivation than that,” David Wright said. “You understand how hard it is to get to that point, you understand the work that is put in and I think that starts here.
“That is what Terry is getting through to us, and I think that’s what we kind of understand now is we were an excellent team last year, a great team last year and that doesn’t mean anything this year.”
Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz are the biggest reasons the Mets can be special, but the return of Yoenis Cespedes and the additions of Neil Walker, Asdrubal Cabrera and Antonio Bastardo mean plenty.
“We’ve got a lot of added pieces and a lot of people back that we had from last year,” Harvey said. “Anybody telling you they are not excited, I think is giving you a bunch of BS.”
Unity was another topic broached at the meeting. Veterans such as Wright, Curtis Granderson and Bartolo Colon set the tone in what the Mets believe is a positive clubhouse culture.
“One of the advantages and pluses we have going for us here is that not only is this a talented team, but we have good people and good leaders,” Wright said. “When you have guys invested in one another and guys that genuinely care about the guy to your left, the guy to your right, you tend to be a little less selfish on the baseball field, and we have that here.”
In recent years the Mets have held team gatherings in spring training, from bowling nights to card games. Collins plans to keep the tradition intact with several team activities this spring.
“We like to be around each other, that is why we do those things in spring training as a team where everybody shows up,” Collins said. “They don’t have to play cards or whatever we might do as a unit, but they have got to be there, and get to know each other and understand that on field they have got to root for each other.
“That is the big thing I saw last year: With all the movement of all the pieces that were put in different places, the one thing that I saw was guys cheering for each other and I thought that was really key.”