Baseball Executive Needed, Cojones Required

Hire me, Steve!

Another day, another disappointment for the Mets in their search to hire an executive. After lowering their sights to a GM working under Sandy Alderson rather than a President of Baseball Operations, the Mets are still looking to make a hire. Today's news is that former pitcher Chris Young doesn't want to uproot his family from Dallas to New York City. Some people are making a big deal of this, but I don't really care all that much. I don't blame the club for aiming high for a candidate, and I don't think they should settle for anyone they don't really want. At this point they should perhaps consider tabling the whole thing for another year and going forward with the people they already have. But that's up to Alderson and Cohen.

Damn (Yawn) Yankees

If someone can decipher the purpose behind Mike Vaccaro's piece in the New York Post yesterday, I would be grateful if you could share it with me. Vaccaro shared a story from the 1934 season, when Giants manager Bill Terry made a dismissive comment about the Dodgers, then in Brooklyn, and it came back to bite the Giants at the end of the season when Brooklyn knocked them out of a pennant chance. Fast forward to today. Apparently there is some parallel to this because everyone is excited about the Mets, and nobody is talking about the Yankees.

Rebooting the Mets

It was becoming fairly obvious for a while that the Mets weren't going to hire a President of Baseball Operations and a GM, signaled by the lack of interviews with any of the big names they were reportedly pursuing. The Mets made it official Monday when Sandy Alderson what it be known that they had changed course and were only looking for a GM. As it stands now, Sandy Alderson will do the job of president of baseball operations. The Mets will hire a GM to work underneath Alderson, with the goal that within a year or two this person would take over running the baseball operations.

The Myth of the Super Tough Boss

One of the first ways Steve Cohen made his mark as the new Mets owner was with Twitter. He's been funny and remarkably candid, even replying bluntly to stories in the locals he believes are off the mark. There was a story by Joe Pantorno on AMNY.com yesterday citing a source that Mets leadership, including Sandy Alderson, would be on a short leash. To those of us old enough to remember George Steinbrenner's heyday with the Yankees, that does not paint an appealing portrait of what you're looking for from an owner. Not that I freaked out about it — I take anything written with anonymous sources with a huge grain of salt. That's not at all to disparage the writer of the piece, who I'm sure did their job in quoting someone with some familiarity on the matter. It's just that the opinion of any third party is just that, an opinion, not fact.

The Waiting Game

Last week I read that the Mets were going to make a decision on their President of Baseball Operations position within the next week to ten days. It's fairly safe now to assume that this isn't likely to happen within that time frame, unless the Mets are prepared to name former Marlins exec Michael Hill, the only person they've interviewed so far, to the position. Clearly the Mets are operating on a different timetable than was expected, prepared to let Sandy Alderson and the people working under him lay some of the groundwork for the new Mets era. So, while it's a bit surprising that so little has happened up to now, it's not really cause for concern.

Cheaters Gonna Cheat

When the news of Robinson Cano's PED suspension popped up as an alert on my phone yesterday, my first thought was that it was likely to be a good thing for the Mets, at least for 2021. My second thought was f*** Brodie Van Wagenen. Nowhere in those thoughts or any of the thoughts that came later was even an inkling of surprise. This was news that I've been more or less suspected I would hear since Cano bounced back with strong offensive numbers this season.