Florida’s youngest snowbirds — East Coast Major League Baseball players — have made their pilgrimage to train among the royal palms for a summer in Queens.
For the New York Mets, that means heading to Port St. Lucie, which is located beyond the Northern tip of Palm Beach in St. Lucie County.
While most players live in New York City during the season, finding seasonal housing is a different story, with players using all means at their disposal, from staying with friends to, yes, Craigslist.
“I found my place on Craigslist, and called a few people and found the right person,” Mets knuckleball pitcher R.A. Dickey told The Real Deal at Digital Domain Park before the team’s game against the St. Louis Cardinals. “That’s how that worked out for me down here for the last two years.”
Dickey is spending spring training in a three-bedroom home in Port St. Lucie, which he is renting with his family. (Check out a video gallery of The Real Deal’s visit below).
Outfielder Scott Hairston, who signed with the Mets in January, spoke to a few players who’d spent previous springs here before he headed down, and they pointed him to a popular player residence, the Castle Pines Golf Villas community, which is located in the PGA Golf Village. He is now renting a unit there.
It’s an adjustment for Hairston, who spent the previous seven seasons of his career with West Coast teams in Arizona that train in the Cactus League, and where he was able to live in his own home during the spring.
“It’s difficult because sometimes, as a player, you can live in three different places a year, but that’s part of the game, part of the lifestyle,” he said. “And if you’ve been in the game a few years, you get accustomed to how things go.”
Another new Met, outfielder Willie Harris, is also living in Castle Pines. He said the formula for finding housing was simple, whether those finding the homes are the players’ wives, the traveling secretary or their agents.
“The main thing is you just want a roof over your head,” Harris said. “Somewhere close to the ballpark so you can get there, sleep in a little later and get to the ballpark fairly quickly.”
According to real estate agent D.J. Morris, who finds housing for a number of St. Louis Cardinal players while they train in nearby Jupiter, players who rent homes in the area typically spend between $2,000 and $3,000 on rentals per month for the spring season.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of [players],” Morris, of Golden Bear Realty, said. “Most of them just want something for a month or two.”
The story is a bit different for the Mets minor leaguers, who hang their hats during spring training at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn. That’s where Mets lefthander Jon Niese spent several summers, although he now spends the spring at a friend’s house in Palm Beach Gardens.
Port St. Lucie has been home to the Mets spring training since 1988, but it also houses the Class A Port St. Lucie Mets minor league team during the summer.
Mets center fielder Angel Pagan, who played a full season for the St. Lucie Mets in 2003 and parts of three others in Port St. Lucie, has seen the city’s growth over the past eight years, which has been driven in no small part by the developer Core Communities’ Tradition community.
Tradition has been in the news in recent years for its massive number of foreclosures — enough that Core Communities yielded back the 4,184-acre community to the lender after a foreclosure judgment on its $86.5 million loan.
But the growth was enough to change the face of the city, and now, players who had little to do in the free time have a host of restaurants, bowling alleys and the like from which to choose.
In fact, from 2005 to 2010, the Mets’ stadium in Port St. Lucie was called Tradition Field. (Through a new naming rights deal brokered last year, it is now Digital Domain Park.)
“Since the first day I came here to now, [the city] is very different,” Pagan said. “It’s got a lot of action going on now; it used to just be a lot of green.”
But for baseball’s winter pilgrims, it’s home, albeit temporarily.