Saturday Seasons: Slipping a Mickey in 2018 as the Captain Sails into the Sunset

The 2018 New York Mets season began with a bang – a nine-game April winning streak creating the (false) hope that a managerial gamble had, for once, paid off and that the team would finally accomplish its on-paper potential. It ended, effectively, in May, and by the end of a June swoon fans and the media were pointing fingers at the manager, the general manager had stepped aside and the replacement management structure was so dysfunctional that the team couldn’t execute the trade-deadline selloff usually implemented by teams going nowhere.

               And the highlight of the season – other than Jacob deGrom’s Cy Young Award pitching -- was the late September farewell to a fan favorite whose career epitaph was not what he had accomplished but what might have been.

               The end result: a 77-85, fourth-place finish, marred, as usual, by some key performers underperforming and others spending long stretches on the disabled list.

               The managerial gamble was hiring the untested Cleveland Indians pitching coach, Mickey Callaway, to replace the (forcibly) retired Terry Collins as manager. Callaway had done wonders with the Cleveland hurlers and was viewed as somewhat of a “pitcher whisperer” who could get the most out of a talented but to-date (deGrom excepted) underperforming and oft-injured staff. Callaway’s hiring meant the Mets were replacing baseball’s oldest manager, Collins, with its youngest, a 42-year-old who, it was believed, would be more comfortable with the trendy analytics than his predecessor.

But in announcing Callaway’s hire, general manager Sandy Alderson felt compelled to spend a great deal of time explaining the process leading up to the decision – a review of 35 possible candidates, whittled down to five for in-person interviews, with Callaway giving an Art Howe-evoking performance that, in the Mets’ eyes, obviated the need for a second round of in-person screening.

               “We weren’t simply looking for a manager, we were looking for a leader,” Alderson said at the news conference announcing the hire, citing Callaway’s “professional competence and personal excellence.”

               But he did acknowledge that it was a gamble. “People are reluctant to name pitching coaches as managers or former pitchers as managers, but in our situation, short-term, pitching is everything,” Alderson said. “I think it was a positive factor in this case. We evaluated the candidates and looked at Mickey and tried to look at the short term and long term, and we definitely think Mickey long-term has potential as a manager. And short-term, maybe there will be some growing pains, who knows? “

“But short-term,” Alderson added, “what is most critical for our success is the pitching, and I think that he has had so much success recently with a pitching staff definitely was a factor for us.”

And when the team came out of the gate with a bang – an 11-1 start that was the best in franchise history and a 17-9 overall April record – Mets management seemed ready to hit the disabled list from too much patting themselves on their backs about how they had made the right hire.

It was only a matter of time before they experienced the statistical concept of regression to the mean. And when they did, it was a colossal regression, and it certainly was mean.

Start with the May 8 game, when Callaway posted one lineup on the dugout wall and gave another to the home plate umpire and the opposing manager, leading to Jay Bruce batting out of order. “It was an administrative thing that I didn't take care of. Once they announce you, you can't do anything," Callaway said in explaining a mistake that snuffed out a potential second-inning rally in what became a 2-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

"It's frustrating," Callaway said. "It probably cost us the game. We had a chance to score in the first, and we didn't."

By the middle of the month, Callaway, the supposed pitching maven, was receiving criticism for mishandling the pitching staff, most notably the bullpen, as highlighted in a May 27 story by Tim Britton, citing a stretch of six games in which the bullpen allowed 21 runs in 19 2/3 innings. “Over the course of these past six days, nearly every Mets reliever has had his hand in this mess,” Britton wrote, adding, “In a week like this, dissecting the details of Callaway’s bullpen management seems superfluous, like picking precisely which Nickelback song you’d like to hear on a continuous loop for seven days straight. “

If possible, things got even worse the next month, a 5-21 June that ended with Kristie Ackert noting in the Daily News that whatever slack Callaway could have been cut for being new at his job had evaporated not only because of the Mets’ performance on the field, but because of the way he was handling it. “Callaway not only mismanaged his bullpen, he then was condescending when explaining how he blew it,” Ackert wrote, adding, “In his first year has manager, Callaway has given the Mets reason to wonder if he was ready at times.”

Ackert's column came a week after the Mets’ management structure underwent a major, and puzzling, mid-season reorganization. Alderson, it was announced in late June, was taking an indefinite leave of absence to deal with a recurrence of the cancer that had temporarily sidelined him three years before.

Whether that was the main reason for his departure, or a convenient, face-saving excuse was a question raised by some writers. As Wallace Matthews wrote in The Athletic, “Three times Jeff Wilpon was asked the question – if Sandy Alderson were healthy, would you want him to return as the Mets' GM? – and three times, Jeff Wilpon deflected it…it became obvious that Sandy Alderson, who a few minutes earlier had in effect fired himself, had done so with the enthusiastic endorsement of his boss.”

To support his assessment, Matthews quoted Alderson about whether he expected to return once he had resolved his health issued his health issues. "With respect to the future, I would say two things: Notwithstanding the good prognosis, my health is an uncertainty going forward," he said. "And secondly, if I were to look at it on merits, I’m not sure coming back is warranted."

But in typical Mets fashion, Alderson’s sort-of departure only further muddied the Mets management situation because he was replaced not by a new general manager or an acting one, but by a triumvirate of assistant general manager John Ricco and special assistants J.P. Ricciardi and Omar Minaya. This lack of a clear table of organization would come into play a month later, as the Mets essentially stood pat at the trade deadline, jettisoning only Jeurys Familia and Asdrubel Cabrera.

As Tim Healy noted in Newsday, “Sellers for the second summer in a row, the Mets began this stretch saying they were looking to add athletic, up-the-middle, close-to-the-majors talent and were willing to eat money to get a better return. They wound up doing none of that.”

And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they limped to July’s end with a 25-4 defeat against the Washington Nationals that saw former Met Daniel Murphy crush two home runs and Jose Reyes borrowing a glove from deGrom to pitch the eighth. The New York Post’s story lead with this: “ Only hours after assistant general manager John Ricco stood pat with his best pitchers at the non-waiver trade deadline, expressing a desire to contend next season with a strong rotation, Steven Matz orchestrated an abomination against the Nationals that screamed “sell, sell, sell.”

In fairness, the Mets did come back a little over two weeks later, to do some crushing of their own, trouncing the Phillies, 24-4, after beating the Orioles, 16-5 in their previous game. Jose Bautista drove in seven and even pitcher Jerry Blevins got a hit, his first ever. And the team did have a successful September, going 18-10. In fact, if you look at their record over the second half of the season, they went 45-37, enough to engender some glass-may-be-half-full optimism about the future. Not that anyone noticed: the hole they had dug themselves in the first half masked much of their success.

So, as the season drew to a close, the team looked for a feel-good moment that would send the fans into their winter hibernation on a positive note. They found it in David Wright’s retirement send-off, an event that accepted the obvious: their beloved captain, try though he did to overcome his injuries, would never be able to return.

On September 29, before a sellout crowd on what Mayor Bill DeBlasio had declared “David Wright Day,” Wright rook the field to a standing ovation that essentially continued through his two at bats and the curtain call he received after he was pulled in the fifth inning. Wright’s daughter, Olivia Shea, threw out the first pitch to her dad.

“I can’t sit here and tell you I’m good with where I am right now,” Wright said in his postgame press conference. “That would be a lie. But it was a wonderful night. It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”

Ironically, or perhaps somewhat touchingly, taking in the scene from the visitors’ dugout was the Marlins’ manager, another New York baseball icon whose Hall of Fame-path career was cut short by a back injury.

“I think it’s hard to not look back at your career in general and think, ‘I should’ve been better at this, I should’ve been better at that.’ And knowing that, for me, the end of your career is not what you were able to do early on,” Don Mattingly said. “I’m sure David will have some of that. But I think in general, you look back and you think, ‘I’m grateful.’ You never know what you’re going to get playing in the big leagues. You did what you did and whatever the reasons are whatever the reasons.”

The enticing lure of what might have been.