In the end, and for reasons we will likely never fully know, Craig Counsell, the man everyone assumed would be the next manager of the New York Mets, opted not to take the job and instead signed with the Chicago Cubs. Was it the money? Perhaps. Or maybe it was something else. What we do know is that Counsell never gave the Mets a chance to match the Cubs offer. So with Counsell gone, Steve Cohen and David Stearns chose Yankees bench coach Carlos Mendoza as their next skipper.
Almost immediately, the "Who the fuck is Carlos Mendoza?" contingent chimed in with their nickel's worth of "expertise," with several radio talk-show hosts proclaiming they were done with the Mets. One of those talk-show hosts, by the way, was the shit head who hung up on Carl Banks the other week, so take that with a rather large grain of salt.
As far as Mendoza is concerned, he is pretty much an unknown commodity. According to Wikipedia - yes, I had to go there - he spent 13 seasons in the minor leagues. In 2011, he was hired by the Yankees to manage their Gulf Coast League team, and in 2017, he was promoted to the big club where he's been the bench coach since 2020. Apart from a rave review he got from Aaron Boone, it's anybody's guess how he will perform in the Mets dugout.
In fact, Mendoza's hiring is eerily familiar to the Willie Randolph hiring in October of 2004. Like Mendoza, Randolph was a Yankees bench coach with no big-league managerial experience. In fact, the only difference between both men is that Randolph had a distinguished career as an all-star second baseman with the Bronx Bombers that included two World Series rings: 1977 and 1978.
While the Mets won the National League East in 2006 with Randolph at the helm, they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS; and then in '07, suffered one of the worst late-season collapses in team history, finishing 5-12 down the stretch and blowing a seven game lead over the Philadelphia Phillies. Randolph's lack of experience was cited as the reason for both failures. He would eventually be fired the following season after the Mets got off to a slow start.
The question for the Mets right now is are they repeating the same mistake they made 19 years ago by going with someone with no big-league managerial experience? The hope is that Mendoza won't be the next Willie Randolph, but the fact is nobody can know for sure. Davey Johnson, if you recall, had no big-league managerial experience either when he was chosen by Frank Cashen to manage the Mets in 1984, and we all know how that turned out. Two division titles and a World Series championship later, the hire is generally considered to be among the best in franchise history.
We also have to keep in mind that Stearns was hired by Cohen because of his expertise in building an organization. Even though the Milwaukee Brewers never won the World Series during his tenure there, he was nonetheless responsible for their ascendancy into playoff contenders. We need to give him the benefit of the doubt here regarding Mendoza, inasmuch as we don't know how the interview went. For all we know, Mendoza hit it out of the park. Take it from a former sales manager who was responsible for hiring and firing, you can never underestimate the importance of a face to face meeting.
Bottom line, the Mets have their manager in place for the 2024 season. Now they have to fill in their roster. That task will fall exclusively to Stearns now that Billy Eppler is no longer the GM.
But that's another story altogether.
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