With this sort of unworkable roster and this kind of unreal luck, it was only a matter of time before poor Carlos Mendoza took the hit. And I mean time as in games or weeks or months at the most, certainly not seasons. Once the Mets started playing and revealing how bad they were, Mendoza’s time was always as short as the list of capable, healthy players at his disposal.
Mendoza’s firing by the Mets on Friday wasn’t fair. But that’s baseball. In the time-worn blame rotation, the manager almost always comes now, after the coaching staff, which was purged in winter in one of about a hundred blunders Mendoza witnessed but didn’t execute.
Mendoza isn’t the one who formed this hopeless squad. He isn’t the one who let franchise legend Pete Alonso walk without an offer. Who thought an aging Marcus Semien at $25 million per year for three years was a better idea than Brandon Nimmo at $20 million a year for five years. Or the one who believed that the annually ailing Jorge Polanco and Luis Robert Jr. would produce commensurate with their ridiculous $20 million salaries.
No, this mess is on baseball president David Stearns. But of course, Stearns was not going to be the one to go now. That’s just not how it works. Deserved or not, the guy making $10M-plus with two-plus years to go on his deal who was seen as the savior coming in and who runs the show is the one who has the staying power.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
