Earlier this month, Yoenis Cespedes felt his left heel barking in pain, as it has in the past. He has often played through the discomfort, but in this instance Mets Manager Terry Collins did not want to take any chances. Cespedes, after all, had already missed six weeks this season with a hamstring strain.

Still, Cespedes rebuffed Collins’s initial attempt to take him out of the game. So Collins tried a different tack, enlisting Cespedes’s two closest confidants on the team — infielders Asdrubal Cabrera and Jose Reyes — to reason with the slugger.

Which they did. As Cespedes returned to the dugout after a half inning in left field, Reyes and Cabrera were waiting for him, along with Collins and Ray Ramirez, the Mets’ head trainer. And it was Reyes and Cabrera who then helped convince Cespedes that he should call it a day after his upcoming at-bat.

“Once in a while, if you hear the same thing the boss is saying, but from somebody else that you really respect, because he’s one of your peers, it helps a lot,” Collins said.