Welcome Back, Seaver

I am trying to have some fun with this baseball season by looking back on how and why I became such a diehard fan. I must admit, the recent fiddling and Francouering up of the game by the suits that run it has really annoyed me. Seven-inning doubleheaders and pretend runners on second base in extra innings are minor league rules brought to the major leagues to deal with issues that could be resolved simply by increasing rosters. The DH-noDH-DH rules used in the National League between 2020-22 mock fans and treat our traditions and preferences like a game of red light/green light. It has made me take to the web searching out old games.

If not for various book projects, I have rarely watched old games all the way through. I might sneak highlights or an inning here and there, but after taking 2020 off from the Mets due to legitimate questions of whether they should have played at all during the pandemic in the half-assed configuration they threw together, I needed something to bring me back this year. So during moments of procrastination, I am looking back—an inning at a time—at games gone by.

Tom Seaver’s Weclome Back to Shea: April 5, 1983

This is one of my all-time favorite games. Three friends and I skipped high school to go my first Opening Day game. In my first eight years of being a Mets fan, this was the first time I witnessed traffic at a standstill because of the Mets. It was the largest Opening Day crowd at Shea in 15 years.

Since I was at the game, I’d never seen TV coverage of this momentum-changing game. While the 1983 Mets finished last, like the Mets of that era seemed to do almost every year, you had a feeling this time would be the last—it being the Mets, though, you could never trust that for sure. Within a year Mex, Straw Doc, and Darling would be the faces of a Mets team suddenly in hot pursuit of first place. In April 1983, however, these were just names in the back of the yearbook—and in the case of Keith Hernandez, it was impossible to imagine a hitting and fielding star of this caliber in orange and blue racing stripes.

When the four of us walked into the bright April sun in the mezzanine on April 5, 1983, the crowd was in full roar as Tom Seaver made his way to the mound. Under my baseball-sleeve shirt my arm had goosebumps. I thought I might even cry. (I read a week later in Sports Illustrated that Seaver wasn’t far from these feelings, either.)

I choked back the emotion and sucked down one of the 48,000 beers sold that day. I counted myself lucky to be at this game—and to have found a parking space.

On WOR-TV the Mets announcers were on their A-game as well. Tom Seaver had been acquired from the Reds that winter for a batch of players even more nondescript than the ones the Mets had received from the Reds for Tom Terrific five and half years earlier. On Opening Day of ’83, Seaver faced a Philadelphia team that would go on to win the NL pennant that year. I am still not sure how. The Phillies lineup was filled with players who had been starting in the majors since I was in diapers: Pete Rose and Joe Morgan, Seaver’s teammates with the Reds, were the first two batters he faced in his Mets return. Tony Perez, who’d debuted before I was born, got the first hit off the new Seaver. Gary Matthews, a dangerous bat but relative baby on the Wheeze Kids at age 32, did not get the ball out of the infield against Seaver. Mike Schmidt, who’d won two of his three MVPs by 1983, hit a pair of harmless flyballs against him.

Seaver had some tricky moments, but he allowed only three hits and a walk. Thanks to a double play and Joe Morgan getting thrown out trying to stretch a single, Seaver only pitched to two batters over the minimum in six innings. Over the same span, Carlton had even fewer issues with a Mets lineup that was punchless, even with the defending NL home run (and whiff) leader in Dave Kingman and overpaid former MVP George Foster.

It was a day for pitchers, and you had to marvel at the efficiency of these two masters. The WOR broadcast revealed that the seven Cy Youngs between Lefty and The Franchise were the most ever (to that time) by aces facing each other. Carlton’s fourth Cy Young had come just the previous season.

Pete Rose, playing right field for the first time since 1971, struck out twice to the roars of the Mets faithful—quite a few of whom surely had to suck down beer to cover the tears forming in the creases of their eyes as well. Seaver was young again—maybe not Cy Young again—but just having him there was good enough. And then he was gone.

Wally Backman batted for Seaver in the bottom of the sixth. Seaver had a left thigh issue, and no one wanted to spoil this Sports Illustrated-cover worthy return with an injury or a loss if some Phillie invariably guessed right. (There was a reason the Reds had sent the 38-year-old Franchise back to New York for a song—a 5-13 mark with career-worst 5.50 ERA and 62 strikeouts as an ’82 Red.) What you could question was George Bambergere’s knowledge of his team.

Wally Backman? Batting righty? Against one of the great lefties of all time? The switch-hitting Backman, the pride of Aloha High in Oregon, had hit .190, .190, and .094 against lefties in his first three years in the majors. He would require the patronage of his 1983 minor league manager turned 1984 Mets manager, Davey Johnson, to get another shot in the big leagues. Suffice it to say, Backman looked bad striking out against Carlton as the perplexed crowd booed the move.

Bamberger had no shortage of faith in Doug Sisk, however. And pound for pound, it was one his most successful outings as a Met. It started with groans when he went 2-0 on his first batter. Sisk was making just his ninth career appearance and he indeed walked two, but he tossed three innings and even picked up the win when head-scratching Opening Day starters Mike Howard and Brian Giles knocked in runs in the seventh.

Unbeknownst to us all, Bamburger, who was acting as his own pitching coach, would quit that job and the manager’s spot as well in less than a couple of months. (Seaver would likewise have a short Mets reunion as an arcane free agent compensation draft in January 1984 saw the Mets expose, and the White Sox take, the aging Mets icon.) But for now, Seaver was done for the day and it was full steam ahead with Sisk.

Even with Mike Schmidt representing the go-ahead run in the ninth, Bambi stayed with the rookie and the Hall of Fame slugger stayed in the park. Sisk fanned the Cooperstown-bound Perez to end it. The game gave the Mets universe a taste of the good side of the team’s roller coaster relationship with the rookie reliever. This was as good as it got.


Forty Years Late, But Joe Torre’s Mets Save Me

It has been a long time since I put together a post of any appreciable depth on this site. To state the facts, I have authored, co-authored, or co-edited 11 books on the Mets. I have been to perhaps 500 Mets games. I attended every Mets postseason game played between 1988 NLCS and the 2015 NLDS (some two dozen games). I listened to thousands of broadcasts on various radio stations with numerous announcers. I watched an uncountable number of games on free, pay, and network TV. Plus highlight films during rain delays and other interludes. Yet at some point in 2020 I lost my excitement about it all. I figured I’d lose my sex drive some day, but my Mets drive? Inconceivable!

Maybe 2020 was a bad barometer. There was so much more to worry about than baseball. I did not watch a single Mets at bat in 2020. I recovered during the Division Series and uneasily watched the Dodgers win their first title since my playoff string started. Yet I was repulsed by Justin Turner, one of my favorite Mets of the bad teen teams, celebrating despite knowing he had the contagious virus that has been fatal half a million times.

And then MLB decommissioned the minor league team I’d spent five years working for on game days. In 2019 the Class A Tri-City Valley Cats were told they would survive the New York-Penn League purge. Later, in MLB’s cruel and infinite wisdom, the course was changed. Troy was ditched almost 138 years after the National League tossed out the Troy Haymakers for the crime of being in not a metropolitan enough area. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

Al Yellon, who curates my favorite non-Mets site, Bleed Cubbie Blue (and whom I have worked with through two editions of Cubs by the Numbers, along with uniform number savant Kasey Ignarski), had a link to a Mets-Cubs game on Chicago’s WGN-TV from 1981. I am not sure why I clicked on the link, but it immediately became apparent that I had attended this game at Shea. And over nine one-inning sittings this winter, Joe Torre’s team—in the final week of his seemingly endless, childhood-crushing regime—brought me back to the fold 40 years later.

I am not going to bore you with the specifics of my teen angst, but sometime during the 1981 baseball strike, I went off the skids. A reckless accident cost me the privilege to drive just weeks after getting my license. Granted, the car was a yellow AMC Pacer. You could not find an uglier, more girl-repelling car if you tried. But it was mine. And I blew it. Not the last mistake I made that year, either.

Maybe this was why my brother, Michael, took me to two Mets game during the final weeks of the strike-marred ’81 season. Mike—along with his twin, Mark—had graduated from Northwestern, outside Chicago. They fell hard for the Cubs and day games, for which I can’t blame them. When Mike got married in Chicago in 1982 I went to Wrigley Field for the first time. Friday afternoon baseball! I even bought a light blue road jersey—no name—for $15. After sneaking a couple of Old Styles, I pondered the plausibility of stowing away in the Wrigley catacombs, living off old hot dog rolls and rock-hard pretzels, spending the winter under a blanket that once kept Bronko Nagurski less frigid on the sidelines.

But back in 1981, on the final Wednesday night of the year, the Cubs and Mets helped bring me back after the strike that rocked my world and shook my faith in baseball. By the night of September 30, 1981, the Mets had already seen their slim postseason hopes snuffed in the split season that screwed far worthier teams than the Mets out of a place in the expanded playoffs. That weekend at Shea the Montreal Expos would clinch the only postseason berth in a Canadian baseball saga even more star-crossed than the Mets have managed in America.

There were 4,473 on hand, the third-smallest Shea crowd of a season with barely 700,000 fans in a year where almost a third of the games were erased for no apparent gain by either warring side. (The next day against the Cubs, October 1, would see Shea’s second-smallest crowd; a game that ended, fittingly, in a tie.)

The game I witnessed again was a good night for Charlie Puleo. Netted from the Blue Jays as the player to be named later for the flash in the pan of mediocrity that was Mark Bomback, Puleo made his first major league start on this last day of September, 1981. He showed some moxie by whiffing cleanup hitter Leon Durham with men on second and third and then retiring Steve Henderson, traded to the Cubs that year for a second helping of Dave Kingman.

The reason I remember being at this game was the Cubs starter: Doug Bird. A journeyman swingman who’d had some good years for Whitey Herzog’s Royals, Bird was, like Puleo, taking a turn finishing another wasted season by his club. (The Cubs would finish behind the Mets before the strike, after the strike, and overall—the definition of a lousy season, no matter how many ways you cut a rancid pie.) I didn’t realize it at the time, but Doug Bird had an even worse summer than I did. He’d won 12 straight games between 1978 and 1981, yet the day after the strike he was shipped from the AL East-leading Yankees to the team with baseball’s worst record, in exchange for Rick Reuschel. I hope Bird didn’t own a Pacer, too.

What I remember about Doug Bird is that he couldn’t hit. He looked so bad in his first swing in the fifth inning that I felt confident I could use the Shea bathroom and not miss anything. When I returned, literally one minute later, my brother was holding a baseball—courtesy of Doug Bird. My brother Mark had caught a ball while I sat home on the previous homestand. Figures! It would be 27 years and many missed chances until I finally caught my own foul ball at Shea a few months before the place closed for good.

Doug Bird could pitch, though. That, along with the Mets’ inability to hit, enabled him to retire 15 batters in a row. Considering the lineup featured their two worst hitters, Doug Flynn and Ron Gardenhire—with former All-Star Lee Mazzilli riding the pine—the Mets trailed 1-0 entering the home seventh. I was confident while re-watching it that the Mets had won this game. I didn’t remember how, though.

The commercials were an entertaining sidebar in this time capsule. A new Toyota Corolla cost $4,700. WGN had Barney Miller and the half hour version of Saturday Night Live back to back. “No Coke. Pepsi.” Cubs announcer and Hall of Fame shortstop Lou Boudreau, who debuted as a player in 1938 at age 21 and as a manager at 25 during World War II, declared Joe McCarthy the best manager ever. Shea’s “Sign Man” was at the game. We all had time to kill.

Even for a September midweek meaningless game, it moved quickly. The Cubs led, 1-0, as 22 batters went up and down between the teams as I sat re-watching the game on my computer during snowstorms, drizzle, sun, and night. The Mets—as only they could—hit three straight balls to the gap and scored only once as Kong was thrown out at second in between doubles by Hubie Brooks and Rusty Staub.  But it was tied. Puleo got a hand cramp in the seventh and, damn the pain and the pitch count, the trainer massaged it out on the mound. Puleo then struck out rookie Pat Tabler with the game on the line. The managers looked as unconcerned about their starters as if the game were played in 1891 instead of 1981. This was the tonic I needed to see in 2021 to get my Mojo back.

Convention finally gave way to practicality and managers Torre and Joey Amalfitano pinch hit for their starters after eight innings. Neil Allen got out of a jam when rookie Mookie Wilson ran down a drive in the gap in the top of the ninth. John Stearns greeted Randy Martz with a swinging bunt in the home ninth. Hubie Brooks conventionally bunted the winning run to second. The first Met of the night to walk—Kingman—was passed intentionally. Mighty Mazzilli came up as a pinch hitter and future Cy Young winner Willie Hernandez made the arduous 338-foot journey in the Cubs bullpen car.

Batting righty, Mazzilli’s ground ball found its way through the hole and Stearns scored ahead of Steve Henderson’s throw. Years before the term “walk off” was a thing, my brother and I were walking off the Shea ramp holding a major league ball. It was the last at bat of Maz’s I would see in Mets pinstripes for five years—when the Mets would somehow be positioning themselves for a World Series run. Charlie Puleo would be a key piece in the December 1982 trade to bring Tom Seaver back to New York—if only for a year. And Detective Fish would offer some sage wisdom on Barney Miller.

Next thing I knew I was back in 2021 watching spring training, laughing at Keith, and listening to Darling talk about pitching. Maybe this is the year. Did you hear there’s a new owner? And the GM, who’s since been fired for horrid behavior to women with these same Cubs, traded two shortstops for one really good one. Or maybe someone else engineered that trade. All I know is it wasn’t that Brodie dude. And what’s with Luis Guillorme’s cult following? Luis probably would have batted behind Kingman on those ’81 Mets.

I don’t know if I’m fully back, but sitting for hours at a time at home watching a kid’s game as it is actually happening sounds surprisingly natural. And simple. You know, I think I’ve got this.


Sherman, Krell, and Me on Zoom

Very pleased to be appearing as part of SABR Day on Zoom on Saturday, January 30. Host David Krell will talk to author Erik Sherman and me starting at 9 a.m. to kick off—wrong sport, how about toss the first pitch—for SABR Day in NJ.

I recently did an interview with Dan Reinhard on WKNY Sports Talk where we discussed the minor league contraction—the team I worked for part-time in Troy, NY was among those teams contracted through the ongoing shortsightedness program of MLB. (It’s not about losing players to develop, it’s about alienating large swaths of fans.) Having gotten the kids off my lawn, we talk Metssie, Metsie, Metsie!

Oh, and since it has been a while for me on the site, I should mention that an updated of Baseball Miscellany. I like to call it my non-Mets book (though there is a fair bit on them in it, natch). It came out a few months late thanks to you know which communicable disease.


41 Words

“Tom Seaver is pitching.” I hear this watching my first game: 1975, third Cy Young. His rookie year until the year he returned—and I cut high school to go—until the franchise folds… Seaver was the Mets. Will always be.

An Experi-Met I Can’t Watch

I heard people say they were worried about me when I announced I was not following the Mets this year. Well, just to reassure you, it’s been a month or so, and I am OK. I may still crack, but I really haven’t missed not following the Mets for the first time since 1974.

It was the automatic runner being placed on second in extra innings that pushed me over the edge. If that didn’t get me the seven-inning doubleheaders would have. And the idea of flying people all around the country in the midst of a pandemic to play in empty stadiums just doesn’t make sense to me. The virus is so out of hand in America that we aren’t allowed to travel to most countries. The bubble idea adopted in Canada—plus the grown-up way they’ve addressed the pandemic—has impressed me a lot. I’ve watched almost every night of the NHL playoffs so far and it’s been mesmerizing. I was pulling for a Canadian team to finally win the Stanley Cup again, and my nhl.com playoff bracket is pretty much busted. C’est la vie.

But, oh, yeah, I was here to talk baseball. If I ever have to write about the 2020 Mets season some day, I’ll utilize the same methods I’ve successfully used to recreate the pre-’74 seasons I never witnessed. At this point, I want to see if I can take it all the way and skip an entire season—though 60 games seems awfully easy to leave out. Especially with the social media posts I’ve encountered fleetingly regarding impending doom both on the field and in terms of Covid health. This year is not normal, and pretending otherwise is an insult to the 170,000 and counting whose lives this disease has claimed just in the U.S.

I’ve spent so much time over the years obsessing over this team, one benefit is I feel like I’m getting some of my time and energy back. I’m not losing any sleep over blown leads, or injuries, or front office foolishness, or a dozen other things I can’t do a thing about. My main concern isn’t that I’m missing something in this asterisk season, it’s that I am not using my extra time wisely. Maybe we’ll meet again in October. Or in the brave new world of 2021, the year in honor of Tommie Agee (number 20) and Cleon Jones (21), the Mets from Mobile. Goin’ Mobile in 2021!

“I’m an air-conditioned gypsy

That’s my solution,

Watch the police and the taxman miss me, I’m mobile!”


Baseball at Any Cost

I don’t know about you, but I am having a hard time getting excited about this truncated baseball season. Baseball has gone on for a century and half through many hardships in America, but never has life in America felt so precarious and sports so superfluous. With 141,000 Americans dead from Covid-19, to date, it makes sports seem pretty pointless by comparison. Sorry if this isn’t as peppy as you were looking for—if I were all gung-ho about this resumption, I’d be real sorry.

Maybe I will get into this at some point. If the Mets pick this year to finally win another championship (doubtful), I’ll be overjoyed (probably). Yet it will be bittersweet for whichever fan base gets to claim this year’s championship trophy. If the virus lets it get that far. Eventually, when (if?) we get back to normal and the 2020 season gets stacked next to all the other years in baseball history, it will be an anomaly, like the shortened 1918 season because of World War I, or the 1943-45 seasons featuring players not wanted in the military draft, or the 1981 season shortened by the first major strike, or the 1994 season halted by an even uglier strike, or the bizarre 1995 season that started late with sour feelings, or the end of the 2001 season, played in the very long shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.

Those seasons, however, did not have to be played without fans in the stands, like the Star Trek episode where the gladiators fight in a TV studio with fake sound effects. Those seasons included minor league baseball, which MLB already was maneuvering to cut significantly anyway—and now they can pretend the virus was the culprit for taking baseball away from many towns that have faithfully supported the game for decades. Forcing the designated hitter onto National League fans is another thing MLB bigwigs wanted for a long time. But to me, the biggest slap in the face is placing a runner on second with nobody out in each extra inning until someone wins. I have watched it for the past few years while working for a minor league team. I call it the David Byrne baserunner, in honor of the Talking Heads lead man: “Well, how did I get here?”

But the whole thing does not feel right. In a country where protecting others from getting sick is seen by some as a kind of political statement, watching a relief pitcher be forced to throw to three batters because that might somehow speed up a slow game, sounds more pathetic than entertaining.

But let’s play ball. Cue the invisible man on second. Pipe in the fake cheers.


You Go Away for One Week…

Actually, everything changed in about three days. I laughed at the idea of taking my bottle of hand sanitizer with me on the plane for our family trip to Colorado—and if the world is moving toward shut down, it is nice to be surrounded by majestic views. Yet by the time I got on the plane to fly back home, I was infuriated that United had no hand sanitizer on board the plane. Oh, if I could turn back time.

I’d also pay more attention to spring training. With preparing for the trip and getting over being sick—it wasn’t Corona Virus, truly, but I stayed away from people for several more days than necessary just because—I saw not a single pitch of spring training. I did listen to a few, though.

It was actually a third of an inning.  I stumbled on Howie Rose’s voice during a game from Port St. Lucie against the Cardinals. (I’ll even miss the interminable number of spring games against the Cardinals!) Luis Guillorme bunted for a base hit, which was not especially notable, but Howie Rose’s description of it was. He explained how you rarely see someone bunt for a hit like that anymore—not bunting against the shift, but a drag bunt placed in an ideal spot between first baseman, second baseman, and pitcher. I pictured Lee Mazzilli doing it to perfection in a 1978 game you knew the Mets would lose, 2-1—probably to the Cardinals! Howie was so pleased by it that I was pleased by it. And then someone I never heard of got a double and Luis trundled home. And then there was a walk, and another walk, and a sacrifice fly, and then one more walk, but Howie maintained the a lively patter. I flipped the station when the Cardinals yanked the pitcher—Silvio Martinez? No, I’m still back in 1978.

Well, we wish we were back to a time when things seemed normal. But we’re not. When things are closer to normal, I’ll be back. I’ll miss the occasional email where somebody enjoys my books, or even the website. One thing I hope to learn in this interval is to appreciate the little things more. And all this time with the family—whether in close quarters in Mountain Time or Eastern Time—is a major blessing during a difficult and frustrating period.

In that hopeful future, whenever I complain about something not going right in a baseball game, I hope I can calmly reflect on what small potatoes that it is compared to having no baseball. Or any other activity considered normal, routine. Instead of this situation where everything you hear feels like coming into a game with the bases loaded and nowhere to put anybody. Life without baseball due to Corona Virus makes you long for the little details and realize that it isn’t baseball that matters but normalcy. And family.


Fonzie, Matlack, and Darling Going All Mets Hall

Facebook™ is a time-sucking drag. If you’re reading this on Facebook, you see the irony. But today it was not so useless because it was there that I saw proof that the Mets Hall of Fame actually exists.

Jon Matlack, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Ron Darling, two of the most unsung Mets and one of the most visible, respectively, are to be inducted in the Mets Hall of Fame this summer. They will be the first Mets inducted since Mike Piazza in 2013.

Alfonzo was treated pretty shabbily when the Mets did not bring him back after he led the Brooklyn Cyclones to the first league title in club history. I gave him his proper respect in a profile on Rising Apple last spring. I always loved him, even though he nearly broke my hand with a line drive hit right at me when I was playing hooky from work one afternoon. I saw Edgardo a few times as I worked for a rival New York-Penn League team. We never spoke, but I thought we experienced some telepathic communication. Me: “Let’s Go, Fonzie!” Him: Imperceptible head nod. I even saw him sign an autograph for a kid between innings—of a playoff game he was managing!

Jon Matlack was working for the Astros organization back in the days when that team was routinely losing 100 games but was scandal free. He came from a spring training workout and spent an hour talking to me on the phone about 1973 for Swinging ’73. Let me tell you, there is not a detail he did not recall and provide insight for, whether it was getting clonked on the noggin by a liner by Marty Perez or surrendering a mammoth home run in Game Seven of the ’73 Series to Reggie Jackson. If you go by Wins Above Replacement (WAR), he is a top 10 Met (as is Fonzie). Get this, 26 of the big lefty’s 82 Mets wins were complete-game shutouts. Sid Fernandez is a beefier version of Matlack, and El Sid needs to go Mets Hall next!

Ron Darling has been a Mets announcer as well as national broadcaster, but he really was a tremendous Met. Like the aforementioned Fernandez, he walked too many batters, but he was a Yale man who could pose on the cover of GQ and then go out and whip the Phillies—like he did to clinch the 1988 division title. Ron and Kevin Burkhardt came to the Mets Booster Club in Port St. Lucie for an event where I was signing. Ron (and Kevin) not only stayed through my little speech, but Ron cited a couple of my books and afterward we had a drink at that bar/bowling alley. Like Matlack, he is the only Met to start three times in one World Series, and all of us hope Mr. P will one day get to call the club “the defending world champions.”

Well done, gentlemen. And after rave reviews of the Mets Fan Fest, that’s two historically inclined moments by the Mets in one week. Keep up the good work, Metropolitans!

Your fans are counting on you. They always have.


Did the Mets Get Smart? Would You Believe, Lucky?

Nobody asked, so here’s my take on the new Mets manager, Luis Rojas.

I don’t know if he’ll be a good manager. Can you say for sure? I do think it’s a smart hire, given the team’s situation and the forced end of the Carlos Beltran regime before it began. They really had little choice butto facilitate that, but it was terrible in terms of PR and timing. Let me count the ways they may yet bounce back…

1. Rojas was already with the organization and managed some of the players when they were in the minors, so they know him and consider him a wise baseball man.

2. Other teams were sniffing around, saying that he was an up-and-coming manager of the future. The baseball gods owe them in the up-and-coming manager department after Mickey Calloway.

3. With the team’s first-ever Fan Fest coming up, it’d sure look dumb if the Mets didn’t have a manager at the event. And do we really need the Mets to look dumber?

4. His dad, Felipe Alou, was a very good manager the Mets should have hired long ago. Let’s put it this way, Alou was available when the Mets hired Art Howe. Let’s not relive that nightmare.

5. People whose job it is to shake their heads in disbelief at what the Mets do thought it a good hire. In the words of ESPN baseball smart guy Keith Law put it: “The Mets have inadvertently hired a highly qualified manager.”

Baseball’s original smart guy and huckster Bill Veeck famously said, “Sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make.” Maybe we can switch that around to say: Sometimes the best moves are the ones you don’t plan.


Dear Carlos Beltran,

I want to thank you for stepping down as Mets manager without ever managing a game. I know it had to be hard to do, but it was for the good of the team. It’s what leaders do, even if it is falling on your sword.

All spring training it would have come up. All six preseason games with the Astros it would have come up. Every time the Mets lost during the season it would have come up. When the Mets played the Yankees it would have come up. When the Mets played the Astros—four frigging times during the regular season—it would have come up. When the Mets needed to win a big game it would have come up.

The Mets need to be about winning, not figuring out who was banging on a garbage can in the Astros clubhouse in 2017. If two World Series-winning managers implicated in this mess were pushed out, the call for the third man named in the commissioner’s report to lose/forfeit his position was not going away.

Thanks again, Carlos. And for being the most productive center fielder the Mets have ever had.
Now if we could get the ownership issue resolved this quickly…
Best,
Metsilverman.com