Then Hudgens provided an addendum to his assessment. The art of hitting relies on harnessed aggression, the ability to sift between balls and strikes, punishing mistakes and accepting walks when available. Discretion is necessary.

The Mets’ general manager, Sandy Alderson, builds franchises with on-base percentage and power in mind. Hudgens believes this. Reyes, 27, understands it as he heads into free agency. He hopes to bounce back from a .321 OBP season, his lowest mark in the past five seasons and about 30 points lower than the pace he set from 2006 to 2008.

Which is why Hudgens adds this about Reyes and his attack-mode at the plate: “We just have to make sure he’s getting good balls to hit.”

– Andy McCullough, Newark Star-Ledger.

Excellent work from McCullough, using plate-discipline stats in an accessible way to track Reyes’ pursuit of a better on-base percentage in 2011. McCullough, incidentally, is also the subject of a good interview in the Amazin’ Avenue Annual, discussing, among other things, life on the Mets’ beat.

I’m on my way back to New York as we speak. I’ll be back here in Port St. Lucie at the end of the month to catch the last couple of games then the first series in Miami. I will add this: As much fun as I had covering Spring Training these two weeks — and I had a ton of fun — it gave me a much greater appreciation for what the beat writers do. I like traveling, but two weeks away from home is pretty close to as much as I can handle. Those guys are here for almost all of Spring Training, then get to recover by spending half their days on the road for the next six months. I suppose you get used to it, but that has got to be exhausting.

I’m setting up some re-runs for this afternoon. It seems the Spring Training exposure has brought a good crop of new readers to this site, so I’m digging up some posts from the past that will, I hope, help everyone know what to expect around here when I’m not spending every day around the Mets. I do try to keep pretty close tabs on the Mets all year round and don’t plan to change that, but there’s a good deal of other nonsense here as well.

One of the posts, incidentally, will be the one I made after banning my first commenter. I included that not because I want to further call out Ryan the very angry conspiracy theorist Mets fan, but because it contains some general guidelines for commenting on this site.