Excitement abound at spring training, and the Mets booth is whole once more

Brandon Nimmo shares his excitement and speaks to reporters in Port St. Lucie. Plus, Keith Hernandez returns to SNY and keeps the best booth in baseball in tact.

What’s Up with the Mets? ❤️

• Keith Hernandez has reached a new deal to remain in the SNY booth for the next three years

• CF Brandon Nimmo chose to skip the World Baseball Classic to avoid the risk of injury, and wants to commit to the team that Steve Cohen has built

• RHP Adam Ottavino is looking forward to the implementation of the pitch clock in 2023 (Sports Illustrated)

• Major League Baseball voted to unanimously make the extra inning “ghost runner” rule a permanent addition to regular season games

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Happy Valentin’s Day, from Just Mets 💘

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The Mets television booth, whole once more, sounds just like home… ✍🏻

Nothing hits quite like hearing the horns from SNY’s theme song blaring through your television speakers for the first time of the year. It’s a sound many of us have grown up with, and that all of us have grown accustomed to.

It’s arguably the best regional track in all of baseball, which is an appropriate pairing with what has clearly become the best telecast in the entire sport over these last 15-plus years.

After some drama and question marks on if it would come together, it was ensured that this booth would remain in tact as it was reported on Monday morning that Keith Hernandez would be returning to SNY for the next three seasons. This now locks in that the trio of Hernandez, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling will stay together for their 18th, 19th and 20th seasons of Mets baseball.

For some fans like myself, this booth is synonymous with Mets baseball – we don’t know a world without them. I, for one, didn’t start watching this team on a regular basis until the start of the 2006 season – the first ever season of SNY and this booth existing. Aside from national telecasts and the occasional series fill-in, I’ve never heard anyone else broadcast games for this team on a regular basis.

Gary, Keith and Ron are Mets baseball. They are as engrained in the fabric of these games as any of the players or coaches, and have been the only constants between eras that have seen a myriad of roster turnovers, managers, front offices, stadiums and even ownership groups. When you hear their voices filtering into your houses, you’re met with a feeling of comfort. It’s warm, it’s familiar, it’s stable. In a world full of constant change, it’s something that you can count on. The Mets’ television booth feels like home – it is that twinge in your heart that you hope never goes away because it reminds you of youth, of better days, and of the life that summer baseball breathes into all of us.

What the three of these broadcasters bring to the table is something special, and is the thing we’ll tell our children or our children’s children one day when speaking back on the good old days. They are this generation’s Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy. They will live on in the pantheon of Mets baseball and will never be associated as a group with any other franchise.

One day, these days will live as only memories – happy ones, at that. But for now, we get to live on watching Mets games the only way we know how: with Gary, Keith and Ron. For a few years more, at least, we still get to live in the glory days.

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Hot Stove 🔥

• The Twins are showing interest in free agent LHP Brad Hand (SKOR North)

• The Padres have recently checked in on free agent RHP Michael Wacha (San Diego Union-Tribune)

• The Cardinals and President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak are in agreement on a two-year contract extension (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

• Yankees LHP Nestor Cortes will miss the World Baseball Classic after being diagnosed with a grade two hamstring strain (Rosenthal)

• Nationals owner Ted Lerner passed away at the age of 94