Francisco Lindor smiling less but Mets fans are liking him more

Francisco Lindor isn’t a Gold Glove finalist. He isn’t a team captain. He isn’t an All Star this year. He almost certainly won’t be National League MVP.

In ways large and small, he’s been disregarded on a national level — curiously deemed not good enough to be considered elite, despite numbers and actions that consistently state otherwise. And through it all, he’s shrugged it off.

Take, for instance, the whole Gold Glove thing. After the NL finalists were announced. Carlos Mendoza was asked what he thought about the snub.

“I don't know,” he said. “If you ask him, he'll tell you he's not here to win personal awards. He’s here to win the whole thing, the World Series. That's his goal. He's an elite defender. I was shocked that he wasn't even in the finals.”

To which Lindor responded: “He’s right. He knows his players.”

Ironically, though, baseball denying Lindor his accolades has been part of how he’s earned something even harder to obtain in this city: full redemption, great affection, and true superstardom. There are, after all, few things New Yorkers love more than being mad at minor injustices.

We can almost forget Lindor’s rocky beginnings here — people deriding his $341 million contract, the “thumbs-down” incident, his confrontation with Jeff McNeil — and that’s because those things no longer matter. They’ve been drowned out by fans singing along to “My Girl,” the walk-up song he chose to honor his wife and daughters as he’s helped blaze the trail through this improbable playoff run.

Also ironically, in leading the Mets to their most successful season since he got traded here, he’s smiling a little less. When he hit the go-ahead grand slam against the Phillies to clinch the NLDS, he was stone-faced as he crossed first base. And that’s a good thing, believe it or not.

For years, Lindor, who, to be clear, genuinely still smiles a lot, has worked under the nickname “Mr. Smile.” There’s an onus to a moniker like that, and one that incurs the threat of artificiality. No one is always happy. And the weight of his contract, the pressure to produce, and the need to be liked and likable can work against the ability to actually do the work that needs to be done. When the veneer cracks, like it did in some of his early travails in New York, everything can come tumbling down.

But that’s not Lindor this year.

After Jorge Lopez threw his glove (Does anyone have that thing? It should probably go in the Mets Hall of Fame), he and J.D. Martinez called a team meeting that, by all accounts, was frank and unsparing. Before a Francisco Alvarez at bat Thursday, he took the rookie aside in the on-deck circle, likely giving him pointers. Multiple times this season, he and other hitters have been sitting in the clubhouse postgame, discussing what worked and what didn’t.

There’s a severity to this version of Lindor that speaks to his competitiveness, but a genuineness that makes people listen. He might not have smiled when he hit that homer against the Phillies, but when the Mets clinched the NLDS, he wept openly along with Brandon Nimmo.

“I keep saying you could write a book,” Mendoza said, speaking of Lindor’s NLDS homer. “You could make a movie, because this is it right here . . . [You know] Lindor is going to do it again. There's no panic. The way he controls the emotions and he hits that ball. It's unbelievable.”

But he isn’t just like that when things are going well. When the Mets were staring down the barrel of elimination after the lifeless loss Thursday night that put them in a 1-2 hole, Lindor looked exactly as he has all season, regardless of circumstances: focused.

“If you have no belief, you shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’ve got to believe. You’ve got to fight for what you want.”

After they won 12-6 to send the series back to Los Angeles, he sounded exactly the same.

“I meant it when I said it,” he said Friday. “If you don’t believe, you shouldn’t be here. You have to, you have to. There’s no other way that we’re going to accomplish the ultimate goal.”

Lindor wants a ring, he wants to be the person who leads the Mets there, and he wants a legacy here. He says it openly, not caring if he sounds self-aggrandizing.

“I want to win it all,” he said. “And ours will be a team that will forever be remembered. This will be a team that comes every 10 years and eat for free everywhere they go. And I want to do that.”

So sure, it probably stings that this year he isn’t an All Star, or a Gold Glover, and probably not an MVP. But you got to believe him when he says that in the end, outside perception doesn’t matter. Only results do.

Mr. Smile is no more. Now, unofficially, the name is just captain.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.