David Stearns, a New Yorker by way of the Upper East Side and Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, understood since undertaking the job to rescue the record $350 million Mets, that the pressure would be nothing like what he felt in Milwaukee, which is not only a Great Place by a Great Lake, but the smallest market in baseball.
And now the pressure rises. Stearns needs to get someone as good or better than Buck Showalter now that he/the Mets decided to move on from the four-time Manager of the Year.
And from here, that’s a pretty short list.
No sir, the Mets can’t afford to take any more Mickey Callaway type flyers. That wasn’t OK even when they were operating under the Madoff-strapped Wilpons.
And it certainly isn’t now.
Showalter took some hits for the Mets’ mistakes this year, as if teams don’t screw up plays occasionally. The issue with the Mets is they didn’t hit. And they pitched even worse.
They didn’t make some extraordinary number of embarrassing errors that you could tie to the manager. They simply stunk.
I’m normally not opposed to changing managers after a disaster of a season, and if the Yankees admit they were a disaster, the Mets were a disaster plus. Or, more appropriately, a disaster minus.
In this case, however, I would have given Buck the final year of his contract to prove this was an aberration. The issue with that, some outsiders told me, was that if the Mets did well next year, Stearns might have been in the uncomfortable position of having to fire Buck off a good year, or, perhaps worse, extend a guy he never hired and maybe wasn’t his best fit.
While I would have liked to see Buck stay, I get it. Stearns should get his own guy. This way, if anything goes wrong, we can all give Stearns the Cashman treatment, which is how it should be.
So while I can’t see any real issue with the decision to hire a new manager, he better be a damn good one. And he certainly better be one with significant experience.
The Mets already tried the rookie-manager route, and we saw how that worked out. While I think Eric Chavez, Joe Espada and others will be good somewhere some day, the job isn’t for some neophyte, no matter how many analytics he claims to know or how colorful his PowerPoint presentation may be. (Word is Callaway won the room with his color scheme.)
This list should be short.
Mine would be two names: Dusty Baker and Craig Counsell.
They need to get somebody comparable or better than Buck, so that eliminates most everyone who’s ever roamed a dugout. Gabe Kapler, Ron Washington, Walt Weiss, Charlie Montoyo and John Gibbons and maybe one or two more who are about to be unemployed (Bob Melvin maybe?) are pretty to very good. But remember, the standard should be high here.
The Mets’ new manager will be in charge of a $350 million entity. Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer are partly off the books, Eduardo Escobar is completely off and Robinson Cano finally off, we take Steve Cohen and Billy Eppler at their word that the team will be competitive in 2024, which would mean serious spending. So we expect some shiny, new toys, especially some to fill out a rotation that looks 40 percent complete.
We aren’t handing over a team with playoff aspirations in New York to some rookie.
Counsell would be great. Baker might be better.
It will surprise exactly no one if Stearns tries to lure Counsell to join him from Milwaukee. While one competitor said this sort of poaching would be “bad optics,” this is a big-boy league. Counsell’s contract is up, he’s a free agent and he’s one of only two to win at least 86 games the last six full seasons (Dave Roberts is the other).
The big question there is whether Counsell — a Milwaukee product and maybe the only current manager who resides year-round in the place he manages — will come. He seeks a nice raise from his $3.5 million salary, but the Brewers probably can compete here, seeing how Counsell has two homes in the Milwaukee area, two daughters in high school in Whitefish Bay, Wis., and two sons playing baseball in the midwestern portion of the Big Ten (the universities of Michigan and Minnesota).
Unless Counsell truly cares about being the highest-paid manager (Bruce Bochy is said to make about $6 million — it’s not quite baseball president money), this won’t be an easy one to win. Remember also, a mansion on a lake in Milwaukee costs about what a room in a pricey part of New York costs.
The other huge coup would be Baker. Some around the game are starting to believe Baker could walk away from the Astros after the year, and Baker in New York would be great for baseball. The man is a treasure.
Of course, and Baker hasn’t loved the analytics-driven interference (or suggestions, if you prefer) from the front office. Which might not make him a perfect fit for these Mets. And who knows if Baker wants to keep managing?
Neither of these two great skippers seems like a slam dunk to come. The pressure is on.