This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo's Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
NEW YORK -- Francisco Lindor is a five-time Major League All-Star, a shoe designer, a player in the fashion world and now … a host of his own show?
Lindor’s newest creation, “Café con Lindor,” launched Tuesday, with its first episode featuring rapper and television personality Action Bronson. The concept is simple: think “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” meets baseball. In each episode of the monthly content series, Lindor will interview a guest about their life, profession and love for coffee.
“That’s why I created this,” Lindor said early in the pilot. “For me, Café con Lindor, it’s about the circle you create. Coffee is an amazing time to have conversations, to just talk about anything, to be quite honest. It just brings people together. It makes that circle tighter.”
The show, which Major League Baseball is producing, is part of MLB’s broader mission to elevate player storytelling and deliver original content across digital and social platforms. It will stream on MLB’s and Lindor’s social channels, as well as on MLB.TV, Spotify and Apple Music.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with Francisco to help execute his vision and launch this conversation-driven original content series,” MLB vice president of player engagement and celebrity relations EJ Aguado said in a release announcing the show. “Assisting Francisco in bringing Café con Lindor to life is part of our ongoing commitment to elevate and amplify our players while also bringing fans closer to the personalities, stories and moments that make baseball so special.”
For Lindor, the series gives him an opportunity to mingle with fellow celebrities from various walks of life, while also indulging in his love of coffee. It’s a relatively newfound passion for Lindor, who didn’t drink much coffee before coming to New York in 2021. That changed when Lindor met Dean Little, a former team employee who attended college in Melbourne, Australia -- one of the coffee capitals of the world.
With Lindor at the center of the Mets’ growing coffee culture, the team added an espresso machine in the Citi Field clubhouse as well as a portable version that goes on the road. Many clubhouse conversations now take place around a cup of coffee, which is exactly the culture that Lindor wants to foster.
“Coffee has become a way of me connecting with people,” he said.
Future episodes will take place throughout the five boroughs (the pilot was shot at Win Son Bakery in Brooklyn) and across the country.
“I might have baseball players. I might not,” Lindor said of future episodes. “Most of it, I want people from the outside that are not in the baseball world, so that we can talk about not really our jobs, to talk about life. To talk about anything. That’s the gist of Café con Lindor: just to have a cup of coffee, to talk about whatever we feel like talking about.”