With the signing of Pedro Martínez and Carlos Beltran, two of baseball's best Latin players, and the broader implementation of what the Dominican-born, Queens-bred Minaya refers to as his ''global development plan,'' the Mets are now engaged in the most overt acknowledgement yet of the game's changing demographics. That plan includes, among other things, dispatching coaches like Mets' missionaries to run free baseball clinics around the world. While major-league teams have been harvesting Latin America for 50 years, the Mets are going a step further, self-consciously rebuilding and, no less important, rebranding themselves as an international team whose ethnic makeup will reflect the increasingly Hispanic city they represent. The team's Latin-inflected style of play -- fast, aggressive, emotional -- will be unmistakable and, if Minaya's hunch is correct, irresistible to New York. But the birth of the so-called New Mets points up a cultural shift in the game as much as a stylistic one. Long one of the great institutions of assimilation -- immigrants once studied box scores so they might sound more American -- baseball now celebrates, even exploits, its diversity.

¶ 12:31 PM