David Wright, former Baseball Factory and Team One Baseball player, is making some noise with the New York Mets.  We congratulate David on all of his success and wish him the best for the future.  Check out the article below from the New York Times, written by Lee Jenkins. Photo by Barton Silverman of the New York Times.

Because David Wright gets to the ballpark five hours early, he has plenty of time to sift through marriage proposals, write birthday cards, down a glass of milk and arrange Cliff Floyd’s Louis Vuitton luggage.

David Wright, who is not afraid to display his emotions on the field, is developing into an on-field leader and a productive hitter in the middle of the batting order.

He reads his father’s text messages, checks how his brothers are doing in school and never calls home without talking to his grandmother. He stars in service announcements that begin, “Hi, kids.” He asks reporters who are requesting an interview, “What time is good for you?”

The more appropriate questions may be: How long can this last? How long until Wright, the Mets’ 22-year-old cover boy, grows up and becomes like any other major leaguer?

Signs of the inevitable are starting to appear. He gets the good seats at Knicks games, late reservations at trendy Japanese restaurants, and he recently had to change his cellphone number. Last summer, Wright’s parents saw him drinking a beer for the first time. Last off-season, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with bay windows and furnished it with flat-screen televisions. And last month, during a game in Atlanta, he was ejected for arguing with an umpire and hurling his helmet to punctuate his case.

There he was, the Mets’ supposedly spotless third baseman, throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of Turner Field, his uniform caked with dirt. But anyone who looked closely at the replay might have been seeing the future of the Mets – their on-field leader, their middle-of-the-order anchor, their public ambassador long after Mike Piazza has retired and Pedro Mart?nez has run out of pitches.

Wright still acts like a second-year player who has been plucked from a bygone era, speaking in old-time baseball platitudes and quoting motivational sayings he learned in the minor leagues. But he is adding dimensions every day. Although passion and perspective are not generally considered major league tools, they appear to be developing as quickly as Wright’s hitting stroke.

“You have good weeks and you have bad weeks, and I am discovering that they are sometimes the same week,” said Wright, who is batting .307 with 9 home runs and 10 errors this season. “I almost think that you have to make errors, you have to strike out with runners in scoring position, you even have to get thrown out of games to really learn. I know I shouldn’t show too much emotion on the field, but I never want people to think I don’t care. That would be the worst.”

What made the episode in Atlanta so jarring is that only two days earlier, in a nationally televised game against the Yankees, Wright came across more like a giddy Little Leaguer than a belligerent pro. He squealed when the Mets turned a double play, yelped when they scored a run, yelled “Yeah, yeah, yeah” at the end of innings.

“He sounded like a little girl,” said his father, Rhon Wright, a police officer in Norfolk, Va. “He sounded like he was hollering in the house, playing poker or playing pool with his brothers. And then, two days later, I see him getting ejected. These are the two ends of the spectrum we’re in the middle of right now. He’s evolving all the time. We’re just trying not to get too excited one day and then jump off a bridge the next.”

Wright and the Mets have seemingly come to the same crossroads. They make diving plays and they boot routine grounders. They hit opposite-field home runs and they strike out with the bases loaded. They win a game and lose a game, win two and lose two. Despite the surplus of veterans on the Mets’ roster, the club is still in the formative stages, with its future shaped around Wright and the 21-year-old shortstop Jos? Reyes.

That’s the reason why Rhon Wright asks his son David to find a less-expensive apartment and go without a new car, why he wants him to meet his neighbors and remember Mother’s Day, why he reminds him to sign autographs and never snap his bat after strikeouts. Wright’s parents used to ground him for bringing home C’s or telling them that he had cleaned up his room when he had not. Now, they ground him in other ways.

“He’s got to deal with it,” Floyd said. “All of it. It’s good for him. And the better he does, the more I am going to give him to do. He will carry all my bags as long as I’m here. I read his fan mail sometimes – girls are asking to marry him – and it makes me sick. One of these days, I swear I’m going to smack him.”

No one in the Mets’ clubhouse takes more ribbing than Wright, but as a twist, he actually gives it back, in a way that can be goofy enough to be charming. When Doug Mientkiewicz reported to spring training, Wright welcomed him to the team by saying: “Oh, so you’re the Gold Glove first baseman.” For a moment, Mientkiewicz did not know if Wright was being serious or sarcastic.

“He portrays this image of being the guy every mom wants to take home to her daughter, but he really isn’t all milk and cookies,” Mientkiewicz said. “He is kind of cocky, but not so cocky that he would ever seem arrogant. The Mets are extremely lucky to have him. They can promote him in front of 6-year-olds and 60-year-olds and it’s all smiles. You can send him to Chuck E. Cheese or a Fortune 500 company and he’ll blend right in.”

When Mientkiewicz looks across the clubhouse at Wright, he sees himself from a few years ago. He, too, was in that idyllic place between prospect and player, between rookie and veteran, making the major league minimum, exceeding expectations by walking onto the field. Then came arbitration and trade rumors, a prolonged slump and an organizational shift, a wife and a baby. Baseball can get more complicated than the greeting cards Wright signs in the clubhouse and the gallons of milk his family always keeps in the refrigerator.

“Right now, everything is perfect,” Mientkiewicz said. “He’s young, he’s single and he’s good-looking. Everybody loves him and the world is at his feet. I remember how that felt and I still sometimes ask myself, ‘Where did it go?’ But one day you feel this switch and everything changes, and it’s never the same again. I only wonder how he will handle that. I think he’ll be fine, but it will be different.”

Wright may eventually stop calling his parents to apologize for on-field outbursts. He may have to go without home-cooked dinners delivered by his teammates’ wives. His Rockwellian image could morph into something more complex.

But Wright insists that he will fundamentally be the same a decade from now, even after any All-Star selections and long-term contracts and appearances on gossip pages. If he is wrong, there is reason to fear that Floyd will come looking for him.

Wright said: “The perception people have of you might change at some point because right now, you’re young and you don’t get millions of dollars, and if you make a mistake, they say it’s just part of the growing process. But I know that, whatever happens, it won’t ever change the person I am. It won’t change me.”