Blaine Boyer sits at his locker in the Port St. Lucie clubhouse, tossing his possessions into a large cardboard box. The locker next to his, once belonging to Boof Bonser, is empty. Two lockers down, Tim Byrdak reads a newspaper. To Byrdak’s left, the locker once assigned to Mike O’Connor is empty.

A whiteboard on the wall reminds everyone shipping cars to New York to remove all personal items from their cars before they do so. A couple of players chat about lining up apartments in the city. Mike Nickeas arranges plans to crash on Ike Davis’ couch for a while. Jose Reyes sings in Spanish. Josh Thole jokes with reporters. Lucas Duda checks a travel schedule on a bulletin board.

A clubhouse attendant emerges from a back room with a light brown maple bat. “Hey Murph, what about this one?” he asks, handing the bat to Daniel Murphy. Murphy examines it for a second. “I’ll take this one on the road,” he says, handing it back.

The Mets are packing up. Nearly 60 players opened Major League camp with the club in mid-February. Now almost half of them are gone, sent to the Minor League side a couple hundred yards away or sent elsewhere entirely.

Wearing a golf shirt and jeans, Manny Acosta walks through the clubhouse carrying a loosely taped cardboard box under his arm. He stops at Pedro Beato’s locker. The pitchers share a brief conversation then a hug, and Acosta exits toward the parking lot.

People often ask reporters — this one, at least — to assess the mood in a team’s locker room, as if that’s something that can be measured.

I can say for certain that the clubhouse smells like sweat and suntan lotion, scents that indicate a combination of physical work and measured preparation — hallmarks of Spring Training.

Some players seem cheerful, enthusiastic. Davis struts down the row of lockers with a joke or a goofy grin for all his teammates. Beato insists Jay Horwitz learn how to dance. Others seem focused, anticipant of either the forthcoming season or the final Spring Training game. Brad Emaus eats breakfast and fills out a form, stopping to ask reporters Citi Field’s ZIP code. Chin-Lung Hu picks a few bats out of a large bin near the clubhouse exit and takes soft practice cuts with each.

Is it a good clubhouse or a bad clubhouse? Damned if I know. Maybe I don’t have enough data points for comparison. At times last year, the Mets’ locker room at Citi Field seemed about as cheery a place as you could find: Rod Barajas pumping tunes from his iPod through a boombox while Alex Cora giddily mock-soloed on a Guitar Hero controller. At other times, naturally, the mood was a bit darker.

The 2011 Mets appear ready. Players making the team know they’re making the team. Boxes and suitcases are packed and being loaded on to the truck outside. At 10 a.m. tomorrow, the Mets will board a bus for the two-hour trip to their hotel in Miami. They will work out at Sun Life Stadium in the afternoon, then play their first game Friday at 7:10 p.m.

From then on, I imagine, we’ll spend a lot more time concerning ourselves with the performance on the field than the mood in the clubhouse. No one doubts they are closely tied, but I suspect the former mostly determines the latter.