We’ve had a few days to let the news marinate that the Mets hired Carlos Mendoza as their new manager. Some accept it. Some doubt it. Count me in as a doubting Thomas. I didn’t get this hire when it was first announced, and I still don’t get it. Here’s why.
After the Mets convinced everyone that Craig Counsell would be their manager, it turned out that he would rather manage in Chicago than come to New York. He received the best of both worlds when the Cubs hired him to be the highest-paid manager in baseball at $40 million for five years, and he can still stay right where he is since Wisconsin is 90 minutes from the Windy City.
The Mets pivoted from Counsell by picking Mendoza as their manager as soon as Counsell made his decision. Still, the larger story is that the team deserves criticism for everything that unfolded.
Counsell played Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns and owner Steve Cohen as fools. He used them to secure a better offer to manage the Cubs and clearly had no intention of managing the Mets. He was hoping another team would step up and grab him, and he got his wish.
You can blame the new Cubs manager for it, but this is truly on Stearns and Cohen for not doing a better job convincing Counsell that New York is the place for him. We can play revisionist history all we want when it comes to the Mets owner not wanting to pay a ransom for a manager, but it’s hard to believe that the owner wanted to hold the line on salary. He would have been happy to pay if Stearns wanted him, and this seemed like what was happening.
Who knows what went wrong in the end? But no matter whose fault it is, the Mets deserve criticism for putting themselves in this position. Counsell was the hire that made sense because he and Stearns shared the same vision and collaborated well together with the Brewers. That’s why Cohen was perfectly content to let his president of baseball operations fire manager Buck Showalter.
To lose out on a guy who had success with Stearns is hard to accept because it puts this franchise behind big-time.
The Mets hired a manager who was part of Yankees’ manager Aaron Boone’s awful coaching staff. The Yankees have been fundamentally bad over the last few years, and one reason is Mendoza. The team has been disorganized when on the field, and Mendoza coordinates fielding practice.
So Stearns should have performed due diligence by interviewing other managerial candidates, such as Ron Washington, Don Kelly, Joe Espada, George Lombard, and Pat Murphy. There was no reason to hire Mendoza in haste, especially when no other team was waiting in the wings.
Sure, Mendoza is highly regarded, but Luis Rojas was highly regarded, too, and he flopped as the Mets’ manager. So what’s going on? Stearns didn’t hire a manager to oversee the game and manage players. He hired him to follow his orders, set the lineup, and apply analytics.
I understand that is part of today’s baseball, but has it ever worked for most teams? Consider who has won the last three World Series championships. Those teams had managers who managed the team using their intuition rather than letting their boss get involved in making up the lineups and dictating what players to use in a certain game.
There’s another issue here, too. It takes a special type of person to manage in New York. What made Showalter successful is that he avoided creating a distraction, protected his players, and handled the media well. Most previous Mets managers didn’t have those skills.
Especially after the bad experience with Rojas experience, one would think (hope) that Cohen would demand his president of baseball operations to hire a manager who commands respect. Counsell could have handled New York better because he played baseball and knows the ups and downs of a long season. He can speak from a player perspective that would have helped Mets’ players handle the grind of playing in the city.
But with Counsell out of the picture, Washington would have been a good choice and a better choice than Mendoza.
Maybe Mendoza will turn out to be the right choice. But right now, it’s fair to wonder why the Mets fired Showalter only to turn around and make a questionable hire. I never thought Showalter should have been fired in the first place, but I also accept that Stearns wanted Counsell. But he didn’t get Counsell, and that makes the Mondoza hire even harder to accept.
Mendoza will have to do more than win his introductory press conference to get anybody excited about him.
