Well, this was the day I was supposed to celebrate my Favorite Nonplaying Met, the player I annually feature whose butt is stuck to the bench because the manager didn’t give the guy a chance. We’ll do the FNP Mets Award another day. The fact that I have such an award says that I have a long history of second-guessing Mets managers.
I have disliked most of them. Joe Torre, whose poor decision-making and making a bad club worse ruined the 59,000 years he managed the Mets between my sixth and 11th grade years. I despised him long before he took over the Yankees. I still spit whenever someone mentions Torre’s replacement, George Bamberger, who quit on the Mets like a nightshift clerk at a convenience store after a robbery. Art Howe was arguably the worst Mets manager I’ve seen in the past 30 years. I kind of liked Dallas Green—maybe because I covered his clubhouse a little in 1995. He didn’t dicker around.
Bud Harrelson was a great guy and a bad manager. Same for Frank Howard. Jerry Manuel had a nice little run there until the 2008 bullpen exploded—that group actually made this year’s pen look reliable. But I quickly grew weary of Jerry in the years that followed. Willie Randolph lost me for good during those last 17 days of 2007. I never liked Terry Collins’s decision making, but the guy did have guts. I thought T.C. deserved the Manager of the Year in 2015 and 2016. And this comes from someone who thought he should be fired as late as July of ’15. By ’17, though, it was so over.
Davey Johnson and Bobby Valentine were the gold standard of Mets managers in my time. Most of the others I judge by the fact that no one since Johnson has been hired to manage another club for more than one season. Except for Jeff Torborg, who was abysmal and was hired by a friend and somehow managed both Montreal and Florida. Into the ground.
And then along came Mickey. I don’t care who they hire to manage the team, so long as that guy can take the Mets to a world championship. They do that and I will hang that man’s picture in my man cave. I’ll hang the GM’s picture, too. Then I’ll start selling off my baseball belongings because I’ll be sure that there isn’t much more to see on this earth. Because I have severe doubts that this team will ever win another title in my lifetime.
Mickey was terrible. Maybe that sounds harsh, but even the things he did right felt like accidents. The players liked him, but I’m pretty sure they really want to win, too. (At least I hope they do!) I thought Callaway was in over his head from the beginning. I would like to see the Mets hire someone who knows what he’s doing. And if the GM or the chief operating officer are texting the manager about who should be pitching the eighth inning—especially if they do this before the game even starts—they need to stop. Let the manager manage. Then you blame him when things go wrong. That is how the game has worked forever. If you are calling the shots, then you are the ones to blame, Brodie and Jeff. One of you can be fired. The other is the reason I have such doubts about another championship while I’m alive.
Baseball managers need to be former baseball players. Is that some kind of “ism” line that I’ve crossed? Like nonballplayerism? Whatever, the players respect people who know how hard it is to play the game and constantly dealing with the pressure that someone can take their job at any time. Unless they have a large contract. And then Cano is batting third every day because the GM got him that contract as his agent. And then traded the farm to get him and someone who created Ninth Inning on Elm Street.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, it seems crazy for the Mets to fire a manager who won 86 games, but this team should have won 96 games. (The Mets Pythagorean W-L, a formula based on the team’s run for and against, was also 86 wins. Anyone who watched this team, however, knows that Mickey screwed the pooch on at least half a dozen games this year because he: 1. used a pitcher too soon, 2. used him too late, 3. pulled a starter who was going great and hadn’t thrown too many pitches, or 4. let Edwin Diaz work it out on the mound with the game on the line when anyone from a million miles away could see the dude was in the middle of a classic sore-arm, down year after a good year, brain-lock meltdown funk. I hope it’s one of those things because the Mets gave up way too much to Seattle just to give up on Diaz and let him figure it out for another team and make Mets fans even crazier than they already are.)
That parenthetical sequence there went on about as long as a ninth-inning with Mickey in the dugout. I had hoped that a pitching coach turned manager would make the staff better. Nope. Jacob deGrom may well win two Cy Young Awards on Mickey’s watch, but the fact that the Mets were only 14-18 in deGrom starts in each of those two seasons is a major reason why Callaway will not be at Citi Field next year. Life is short. And so was his tenure.