Last year, when Francisco Lindor got his hand caught in a door in his Los Angeles hotel room, resulting in a crack in the tip of his right middle finger, he sat out for just a day.
In June, after he was up almost all night with his wife, Katia, as she gave birth to their second daughter, Amapola, Lindor showed up at the ballpark a few hours later, skipped going on the multi-day paternity list and begged into the lineup. Manager Buck Showalter didn’t oblige, but Lindor wound up pinch hitting that day anyway.
A couple of weeks later, when Lindor was so sick that he required IV fluids before a game, causing the Mets to delay finalizing their lineup, he wound up playing all nine innings (and the next day had one of the best games of his career).
For Lindor, the Mets’ ironman, the intense desire to play every game — to treat everyday player as a literal term — has a decades-old origin story involving his father, Miguel Lindor, and nervousness that became stubbornness.
“I wanted to show my dad I can play,” Lindor said Wednesday. “To this day, I still want to prove to my dad that I can play.”
The background, as shared by the Mets’ shortstop, goes like this: In the late 1990s, when he first started playing organized baseball in Puerto Rico, he “played up,” joining a group of older kids. He spent the first years of his life hanging around with an older brother and cousin, so by the time Lindor had a chance to go against his peers it was “boring in a way,” he said. Hence, seeking out older competition.
But when he was 4 or 5, everybody else was 6 or 7. When he was 6 or 7, everybody else was 8 or 9. Even as he got older and better, the others were older and bigger still.
“I used to make up excuses to not play because I was scared,” Lindor said. “[This was] when I was little little. I used to play up, so everybody was bigger than me, taller, stronger.
“My dad used to tell me I was made out of glass. Because I would always say…
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