David Lennon: Mets' brass won't quit on Carlos Mendoza. . . at least not yet
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza talks to the media before a game between the Mets and the Washington Nationals at Citi Field on Tuesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
One 9-19 team fired its manager Tuesday afternoon.
The other was the Mets, and Carlos Mendoza insisted a few hours later that nothing had changed regarding his own tenuous hold on the job, at least in recent conversations with owner Steve Cohen and president of baseball operations David Stearns.
“Business as usual,” Mendoza said before Tuesday night’s series-opening 8-0 win over the Nationals.
In Flushing, however, business has been bad. But evidently not bad enough yet to relieve Mendoza of his managerial duties, as the Red Sox did with Alex Cora on Saturday and the Phillies, co-owners of baseball’s worst record with the Mets, did with Rob Thomson earlier Tuesday.
Hard to believe that two managers would be canned before the end of April and the list does not include Mendoza, who presides over MLB’s most expensive underachiever, a $370 million bust that was already 10 games under .500 and 10 1⁄2 games behind division-leading Atlanta entering Tuesday.
“It’s the reality,” Mendoza said. “It sucks. When you don’t see the results, it happens.”
The Mets finally did get results later that night, thanks to Clay Holmes’ six scoreless innings and Juan Soto going deep to power a seven-run fourth inning. How desperately did Mendoza need this win — just the Mets’ third in their last 18 games? He used his best reliever, Tobias Myers, for six outs in what normally would be considered a laugher.
“I don’t think one day — good or bad — is really going to change much,” Holmes said. “I think it’s having a long-term view if we really want to get where we want to go.”
The Red Sox and Phillies opted for immediate action, and witnessing two high-profile, big-market, October-targeting teams push the reset button at this early stage only ratcheted up the pressure on the Mets. But the front office refuses to make Mendoza the scapegoat for the team’s myriad problems — at least not yet — and Tuesday’s new batch of injuries just gave them another excuse to stick with Mendoza for a while longer.
What’s the point of firing Mendoza when someone else is just going to be stuck with a broken roster that continues to crumble by the day? And that someone is not going to be Cora, who reportedly plans to sit out this season to spend time with his family (and collect the $7 million owed to him from the Red Sox).
The Phillies apparently were motivated enough by Cora’s availability to ax Thomson, but he declined when offered the job by Dave Dombrowski, his former GM when the two won a World Series together in Boston. Instead, the Phillies pivoted to bench coach Don Mattingly, a handy Plan B with a dozen years of managerial experience.
The Mets don’t really have a Mattingly-type on the shelf anywhere in their organization. There’s Carlos Beltran, who spent 76 days as the Mets’ manager prior to the 2020 season before he was fired for his role in the Astros’ cheating scandal, but he seems content for now as a special adviser, given his family commitments. Andy Green, the Mets’ senior VP of player development, managed the Padres for three seasons and was a bench coach under David Ross with the Cubs, so he’s a likely candidate who could step in.
As for the current coaching staff, none have previous managerial experience in the majors and all of them are new to the Mets, a risky combination for such a volatile market in these turbulent times. Cohen and Stearns clearly are hesitant to pull the trigger on Mendoza, and looking over their in-house options probably gives them more reason to pause.
Also, the Mets don’t seem to be in any shape to pull out of this nosedive in short order.
They’ve already lost Francisco Lindor for two months due to a calf strain, and Jorge Polanco remains in limbo with his Achilles issue. So imagine the surprise when Luis Robert Jr. was missing from Tuesday’s lineup — he’s nursing lower-back tightness — and Mendoza revealed that Soto is bothered by a sore left forearm, meaning that he’ll stay at DH for the immediate future.
Soto’s MRI came back OK, showing no structural damage to the ligament, but this was reminiscent of Soto’s similar problem during his 2024 season with the Yankees, who described it as inflammation that only cost him a few days. No injury is too minor to shrug off when it comes to Soto and any further IL stints could wind up being fatal to the Mets’ slim rebound hopes.
As for Kodai Senga’s lumbar inflammation, that merely provided the Mets an avenue to remove him from the rotation, something they needed to do anyway. Now David Peterson goes back into the rotation for Wednesday, with Christian Scott starting Friday in Anaheim.
Mendoza had enough problems before Tuesday’s body blows. And with all the healthy Mets malfunctioning, as well, the manager was asked point-blank if maybe the roster just isn’t very good.
“I believe in those guys, and I will continue to do so,” Mendoza said. “It’s my job to get the best out of them.”
Mendoza kept that job for another day, but every night feels like a one-game season, with higher stakes tied to the outcome. Tuesday’s victory marked a rare occasion, as the Mets scored as many as eight runs for only the fifth time — and neither the manager nor his players were booed at Citi Field.
“Just giving a little confidence to the lineup,” Soto said. “Remember what we’re capable of.”
And just in time to turn down the heat on Mendoza, if only for another 24 hours.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
