Mets open $10 million Dominican facility with cold plunges and classrooms

When a $10 million academy in Boca Chica builds cold plunges into the first stop for 16- to 18-year-old signees, recovery stops looking like a perk and starts looking like infrastructure.

The New York Mets officially opened their new player development complex in the Dominican Republic on Thursday, April 16, 2026, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony about 30 minutes from Santo Domingo. Funded entirely by owners Steve and Alex Cohen, the facility is designed for the organization’s youngest international prospects, the players who sign as amateur free agents and move into the Dominican Summer League before they ever reach the States.

Inside the complex, the Mets packed in the kind of setup that used to be reserved for big-league campuses and elite college programs: a 10,000-square-foot weight room, a nutrition bar, a 16,900-square-foot turf agility field, an expanded training room with hot and cold plunge pools, an open-air batting cage extension, a remodeled clubhouse, modern classrooms and 18 suite-style bedrooms. Mets officials said the model was inspired by Division I college football training centers, and they called the Boca Chica site an “outlier” in the Dominican Republic.

That word matters because this is no isolated splurge. The Mets train roughly 70 to 120 players in the Dominican Republic at different times of year, and every one of the 30 Major League Baseball clubs now has training camps there. In that field, the real competition is no longer just for signing talent, but for giving 16-year-olds a place where the physical work, recovery work and classroom work all happen under one roof. Andrew Christie, the Mets’ director of player development, said many young international players have had little exposure to that kind of environment. Assistant general manager Eduardo Brizuela said the biggest gap with U.S. players is often the physical side.

The new Boca Chica academy also fits into a wider Mets development chain. It is meant to complement the club’s ongoing $60 million renovation of its Port St. Lucie player development complex, where many international players later move after graduating from the Dominican academy. The organization first unveiled a Dominican academy in Boca Chica in 2008, and this version pushes the concept much further, with hot tubs, cold plunges and classrooms sitting beside the turf and batting cages. For the Mets, the message is clear: if cold exposure used to be a bonus, it is now part of the baseline.