How to Actually Navigate the Ny Mets 2023 Spring Training Schedule
I spent last spring digging through this stuff because my brother kept asking me which games were worth going to, and honestly, the official site makes it harder than it should be. The Ny Mets 2023 Spring Training Schedule isn't buried anywhere mysterious — it's right there on mets.com under the spring training tab — but the way they organize it will drive you crazy if you're trying to plan a whole trip around it. The schedule is hosted at the main Mets site, and it covers games from mid-February through late March at Clover Park in Port St. Lucie, Florida. That's the Cactus League setup. Everything runs on Eastern time, gates usually open 90 minutes before first pitch for most of these exhibitions. I'd recommend checkingClover Park's own site for parking details because the lot fills up fast on weekend games, especially against division rivals. Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the spring training schedule changes constantly. A February 28 listing might show a game against the Phillies, and two days later it's rescheduled because the original opponent had a pitching matchup that got bumped. This happens every single year. I learned this the hard way when I drove all the way to Port St. Lucie for a supposed Tuesday night game that got moved to a doubleheader the morning of. My workaround was simple — I stopped trusting the printed schedule and just set a Google Calendar alert for any Mets spring training event with the note "verify same day." It costs nothing and saves you a 90-minute drive into nowhere.
What the Schedule Actually Looks Like in Practice
The 2023 camp ran roughly from February 17 through March 28. Opening Day that year fell on April 1, which is early even by modern standards, meaning pitchers had more camp time than usual. That creates a noticeable pattern in the schedule — early February games are almost entirely rookie camp and minor league folks who won't make the roster anyway. If you're planning to watch and you want actual MLB-caliber competition, you're better off targeting late February onwards, especially the last two weeks. The real value in sifting through the schedule is finding the interleague games. Mets spring training sometimes throws in an exhibition against an National League East team that you wouldn't normally see at Cactus League stadiums. Those games draw bigger crowds and usually feature the guys who are actually competing for jobs. Skip the mid-March solo batting practice days unless you have a specific prospect you're tracking — they're basically free open workouts and the field conditions vary wildly depending on how much rain the area has gotten.
A Specific Edge Case That Wasted an Afternoon
Back in 2023, I hit a weird glitch where the schedule page showed a game as cancelled due to weather, but Clover Park's own event calendar still had it listed as happening. I showed up anyway. The game was on, but at a completely different time than advertised — it got pushed from a 1:05 start to a 4:10 night game with no public notice beyond the stadium's internal system. I ended up sitting in the sun for three hours before anyone at the gate would confirm it was actually happening. The workaround? I started cross-referencing the Mets app push notifications directly against the stadium's Twitter account instead of relying on either one alone. The Mets app updates first but sometimes silently. The stadium's feed catches the last-minute changes but doesn't always explain why. Together they cover each other's blind spots. Spring training tickets are nowhere near as expensive as regular season seats. General admission for a weekday game in 2023 ran somewhere in the $10 to $15 range. Weekend games and rivalry matchups push into the $20 to $35 window. Behind-the-fence seating is the cheaper option and honestly the better value if you don't care about shade or reserved seats — you're close enough to hear the mound conversations and the catchers calling pitches. The one pitfall that trips people up is assuming a spring training game is the same length as a real one. Exhibition games routinely go 7 innings instead of 9. Some of them are shortened to 5 or 6 innings when roster evaluation wraps up early. The official schedule rarely flags this, so plan your day around a 2.5-hour window minimum, not the 3-hour norm you'd expect for a full game.
Get the Full Details
How I Actually Use the Schedule Now
I don't follow the full calendar anymore. I just track three things: opening day of camp for the main roster, the final exhibition against a top Cactus League opponent before the split squad moves, and any date where a notable free agent or borderline roster guy has been publicly linked to a workout. The rest is noise. Clover Park is small enough that walking in without a ticket usually works for anything before mid-March, but having a date locked in makes parking and food lines significantly less painful. If you want the raw schedule data, go straight to the official Mets spring training page. Don't bother with third-party aggregators — they lag behind the official cancellation and time-change feeds by hours, sometimes days. And if you show up for a game that gets rained out, the stadium typically offers a date-specific rain check redeemable at any Port St. Lucie event through the end of camp. I've used those twice. They work fine, but you have to print or screenshot the physical ticket stub before you leave the lot, because the entry scanners won't process a digital image after the gate closes.
