Carlos Mendoza: the best Mets manager since Gil Hodges?
It’s a great time to be a Mets fan.
This team is firing on all cylinders right now. Standing, at this writing, 20 games over the .500 mark, and playing good, crisp, and -- for the most part -- intelligent baseball, they find themselves four-and-a-half games clear of the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League East. Fangraphs pegs them with a better than 95% chance to make the playoffs. And they aren’t even at full strength. The starting pitching has been surprisingly strong, despite missing Frankie Montas and Sean Manaea, neither of whom has thrown a pitch in anger at the big-league level yet. And yes, they’ll have to weather the loss of Kodai Senga to a strained hamstring for a couple of months. The offense, despite their shortcomings with runners in scoring position, has been stellar, sitting fourth in the NL in runs scored and tied for third in team OPS+. The fans haven’t been this excited about the on-field product since at least 2015.
And here’s the thing: this team is eminently likeable.
They all look like “good guys,” don’t they? Sure, Juan Soto is being obscenely well-paid, but by all accounts, he’s a great teammate. Pete Alonso, despite his own most recent financial windfall – and at the rate he’s producing, he’ll be in line for another one soon – remains the loveable goofball who actually would enjoy a pancake breakfast with Mr. Met. Francisco Lindor is the undisputed leader, while living up to his “Mr. Smile” nickname. It looks like they genuinely like each other. All you had to see was a disconsolate Alonso on the field when Senga went down, thinking it was his high toss to first that caused the injury, then Senga turn around and say no, he felt something go before the throw was ever made. Or something like Brett Baty taking complete responsibility and accountability for his own poor throw to the plate that allowed the Los Angeles Dodgers to tie the score and essentially steal a win on June 5. “That’s a play that can’t happen,” he said in his postgame interview. That’s refreshing to a fan who remembers “Know your place, Rook,” and tales of sniping about what music gets played in the clubhouse. President of Baseball Operations David Stearns deserves a lot of credit for finding and hanging on to these kind of quality “character guys.” Keeping them all together and focused on a day-to-day basis is the job of the field manager.
To the consternation of many, modern analytics has lessened the influence of the manager on lineup construction and, to a lesser extent, in-game strategy. The manager’s main jobs nowadays are keeping the clubhouse together and dealing with the press. Carlos Mendoza has succeeded at those tasks brilliantly. Whenever a manager is fired, there are always rumblings that he “lost the clubhouse,” that the message of all the guys pulling together for the same goal has been muted, somehow, as if some guys really don’t want to win a World Series – ridiculous on its face, I know, but that’s the noise that leaks out in that aftermath. It would seem that Mendoza is in no danger of that happening. He has his players’ backs, always, and isn’t afraid to get tough when he has to. He trusts and respects his guys, and they trust and respect him. If you read up on the Miracle Mets of 1969, that’s the theme that came through about that team’s manager, the revered Gil Hodges. Hodges just commanded respect, through and through, whether it was because of his stellar playing career, or the fact that he was an ex-Marine who saw World War II action in Okinawa, or his mid-Western calm manner in the face of all the NYC chaos of the late-‘60s/early-‘70s or a combination of all those things, we’ll never know. But everybody knew who was boss, without him having to flip a buffet table,
If you’re reading this, you’re probably fairly well versed in this team’s history and you know they have had their share of bad managers, but since Hodges, even the successful ones had their flaws. Yogi Berra – Hodges’s successor – brought nothing to the table besides name recognition and it could be argued that farm director Whitey Herzog should have named manager instead. Davey Johnson, a generation later, won more games than any other Mets manager, but he could be known to carry a grudge and be spiteful. Bobby Valentine, an extremely intelligent man, kept trying to reinvent the game to suit his own ego. Willie Randolph was in over his head, as evidenced in his quote in the aftermath of the crushing 2006 loss in the National League Championship Series, “the game moved so fast…” Terry Collins relied on his “gut” far too much – see Johan Santana’s no-hitter and Matt Harvey in game five of the 2015 World Series. Buck Showalter had a lot of miles on him. So, my answer to the question in the title of this piece is a resounding “yes!”
Now all Carlos Mendoza has to do is bring home a title.
So much depends on the team that is assembled on their MLB player roster. Hodges had so much fall together with pitching, a season for the ages with Cleon Jones hitting .340 and management being smart enough to pluck Tommie Agee and Al Weis and Donn Clendenon from competitors. Johnson had the next explosion of pitching with Gooden, Darling, Fernandez and the team pulled it together over three seasons with the trades for Carter, Hernandez, Knight and Ojeda. Collins had the next explosion of pitching with Harvey, deGrom, Thor and the imported bat of Yoenis Cespedes and Showalter looked like a genius one year and a washed up leader the next.
In Mendy’s first season, this group ripped him apart constantly second guessing his moves. Over time we realized how good a manager he is and how well he relates to the players and does make good in game decisions. Kudos to the Yankees for all their years of training. Again look at what management brought to the table with Holmes, Soto and Torrens and you see the impact on the success of the manager even with two fifths of the expected rotation not having thrown a pitch. I like Mendoza but not ready to anoint him until he wins a title. If he does win this year, he will have matched the number of titles by any other Met manager and then I will join you in singing his praises.
Fans are the last to know about managers. We don't have access and we have to rely on the mainstream press. But the MSM is much more interested in preserving access than accurately portraying what goes on. For years we heard so much about how great Terry Collins was. And it wasn't until he was leaving the Mets' beat that Marc Carig wrote that piece detailing what Collins was really like. And it was not pretty.
As for Hodges, I know as Mets fans we're not allowed to even think, much less say, anything that might not be 100% positive. Dying young has its privileges. And for the record, I'm more than familiar with what his players have said about him over the years. It's just that no one is beloved by 100% of his players. The old Casey Stengel quote -- the key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from the ones who are undecided. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that all Mets players genuflected when in Hodges' presence? Sorry, I don't buy it.
I'm all for judging everyone by making a list of pros and cons. The pros for Hodges have been well delineated over the years. But no one's making a list of cons. In an era where it was very common for teams to win back-to-back, the Mets went 83-79 in the two years Hodges managed after the World Series victory. If he was such a great manager, why was he able to lead a team to the championship and then be so mid in the two following years with mostly the same players? Why did he run off Nolan Ryan and Amos Otis? Why did he think acquiring Jim Fregosi was such a great idea? Why couldn't he get more out of Gary Gentry?
I wish we could recognize Hodges' place in team history, which is an extremely important one, without making a saint out of him. The Hodges myth is so ingrained that people who weren't there take it as gospel. As for me, give me the manager that won 90 or more games 6X in 7 years while dealing with massive egos, rampant drug use, crippling injuries and head-scratching trades. That's the guy who did the great managerial job, not the one whose team won it all because the best team collapsed while his team exceeded its Pythagoran win total by 8 games. And then under-performed Pythagoras by a combined 8 games the following two years.