Life comes at coaches real fast around these parts. You are a genius one year, and an endangered species the next.
On Tuesday, the Liberty fired Sandy Brondello after two years on the job, a coach who had led the team to its first WNBA championship the previous season. Then there is beleaguered Giants head coach Brian Daboll. He’s in self-preservation mode by starting Jaxson Dart at quarterback in an attempt to jumpstart his team’s sorry start at 0-3.
Job security has to be on the mind of Mets manager Carlos Mendoza. Despite a great run in ’24, his team could miss the playoffs in ’25. The season-closing series will tell the tale.
Mendoza got a reprieve on Tuesday when the Pirates beat the Reds and the Mets beat the Cubs, 9-7, at Wrigley Field. The combo gave NY a one-game lead in the Wild Card race over Cincinnati and Arizona with five games to go for New York, two in Chicago and three in Miami.
Mendoza will be sweating it out, and make no mistake, someone will pay if the Mets miss the playoffs. But it certainly won’t be Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns, since Mets owner Steve Cohen is committed to him, and firing Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez won’t be enough.
This makes Mendoza expendable. It’s easy to fire managers.
It’s not the Mets manager’s fault that his starters (David Peterson, Sean Manaea, and Kodai Senga) have been ineffective the last few months. It’s challenging to rely on rookie pitchers (Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong). And it’s not Mendoza’s fault that he doesn’t have reliable relievers outside of Edwin Diaz.
Photo courtesy NY Post
A manager is only as good as his players are. Remember, this is the same manager who led the Mets to the National League Championship Series last year. He did not become stupid overnight. His pitchers did.
Plus, Stearns did nothing to upgrade the rotation when it was needed. He thought the pitching lab would fix Griffin Canning, Frankie Montas, and Clay Holmes. Canning and Holmes performed well for a while, but then Canning was sidelined for the season with an Achilles tendon injury, and Holmes ultimately struggled. Montas was ineffective, and he was out for the season with a UCL injury in his elbow.
The Mets’ president of baseball operations should have gone after reliable starters out there in the offseason. He should have resigned, Luis Severino. He should have found a way to trade for Merrill Kelly at the trade deadline. He had no interest in giving up prospects for one.
So Mendoza had to make do with what he had to work with, and the truth is that all the financial resources the Mets have don’t guarantee health and effectiveness. But someone is going to pay for everything that has gone wrong. So, right now, the Mets are in a self-preservation mode.
Mendoza really needs to get at least a quality start out of Holmes or Manaea. There’s no way he can trust Peterson to pitch again after another ineffective performance against the Cubs on Tuesday night, in which he allowed five runs on five hits in 1 1/3 innings. Plus, Mendoza has to hope the hitters power the Mets to victory, like they did on Tuesday night, to compensate for poor starting pitching.
He also could use some luck, such as on Tuesday when his team pulled off an improbable comeback by rallying from a 7-1 deficit to tie it and then win it on Francisco Alvarez’s eighth-inning game-winning home run.
However, the bottom line remains unchanged. If the Mets don’t get the job done, it will be a long offseason, and someone will pay the price. No doubt it will be Mendoza.
