A quick note before we get into it: the Weekly Scorecard is going back on indefinite hiatus, hence its absence yesterday. My mom is visiting right now, so I'm not doing much writing anyways, but more importantly it's just taking up time and energy I could be using to write other things. Like this! So we'll see if/when it comes back. (I'm thinking it may remain more of an offseason serial to stay abreast of trade/signing news.)

As I'm sure you've already heard, the Mets fired Carlos Mendoza on Friday morning. Well, they "announced his departure", which is a fun euphemism. As though it just happened out of nowhere. The news was followed by press conferences, rumors of replacement, and an ill-timed appearance from Mr. Met in short order.

His (temporary) replacement, Andy Green, has served as the Mets' senior VP of player development since late 2023. During David Stearns' press conference, he was firm on this being an interim position, and that Green would move back to the front office after the season ended rather than being a candidate for the full-time job. Green managed the Padres from 2016-19, during which time they weren't particularly successful; however, the team was "rebuilding", so it's hard to pin their struggles on him. One of my friends said that her Padres-fan friend liked Green a lot as their manager, so that's something.

With David Peterson getting moved to the Cubs earlier in the week, it feels like the organization is starting to make slow but meaningful changes, like two tectonic plates slipping past each other in tiny bursts along a fault. On one hand, it's been a long time coming. On the other, I don't know how much it will actually help. Consider the two other mid-season manager firings we've witnessed this year:

• The Phillies have been wildly successful since Rob Thomson was replaced by nepo dad Don Mattingly. They have a very talented roster—loath as I am to admit it—so it's possible that Thomson was the issue, but it could be correlation rather than causation.
• The Red Sox have not been wildly successful since Alex Cora was replaced by Chad Tracy. However, their roster sucks complete ass, which I think is the main problem.

Which way the Mets go will ultimately come down to what the underlying issue is, which is really difficult to tell from the outside.

I try not to make overzealous assumptions about the role of the manager on a major league team. It's always tempting to call for someone's head over a shoddy lineup or ill-timed pitching change, but managers don't manage a lot of that stuff these days. That's why I generally direct blame at the nebulous figure(s) of "whoever made this lineup" (and so on), because I know much of that decision-making is being driven by people beyond the manager, and that I don't actually know who it is.

That being said, when it comes to the Mets specifically, the last year has convinced me that something in the decision-making pathway sucks. I suspect something may actually be rotten in the analytics department, because:

1. They've had a job listing for months for someone to come overhaul their internal systems to use "agentic workflows" and a whole bunch of other stupid bullshit, so the management must be questionable at best;
2. They've also maintained an open listing for a senior data scientist in the analytics department, which requires a Ph.D. or equivalent, and the base salary range starts at $120,000. If you have a Ph.D. in statistics and strong programming skills, this is laughably underpaid for a job in NYC. So it's possible they are not attracting the best possible talent on the market and/or not compensating them particularly well.

Assuming the entire analytics department is amazing at their jobs, there must be a breakdown somewhere in the communication pipeline. The information on what needs to change regarding player mechanics, etc., is not being implemented well or reaching the people it needs to reach. Based on the CNN article I linked above, that may, in fact, have been an issue with Mendy.

Whether or not that's the case, there are a few key things that I assume definitely are on him that have stood out more and more over the past several months, which largely come down to managing people. In particular, I've increasingly gotten the vibe that while the players liked Mendy, they did not respect him or listen to him as their manager. For example:

• The issue of Mark Vientos running through stop signs was "addressed", but I know I've also seen Alvy do it since then. It's not like they debuted this year—why is this a conversation that still needs to happen? Why hasn't this already been drilled into their heads?
• Oh my God, the ABS challenges. The way Mendy framed it, it was, like the baserunning, an "instincts" problem. In the very next game after that interview, Marcus Semien challenged a pitch that wasn't obviously outside in a low-leverage situation early in the game, and it didn't even change the outcome of his plate appearance, because he walked anyways! I'm not going to check the actual numbers on this, but it felt like we'd been making challenges like that all the time, in a way that I didn't see every other team doing. With Mendy suggesting there had been multiple conversations with the players about it, the inference that follows is that they just weren't listening.
• Amidst all the injuries—the ones we knew about—it felt like there was a general refusal to take time off. I'm specifically thinking about Lindor playing with a broken toe last year, to the detriment of his performance, as well as Peterson allegedly not being injured, but generally seeming like something was bothering him (especially around his previously-injured hip) at the same time that his pitching fell apart. This year, I don't think it would've hurt to give Semien an occasional day off before he ended up on the IL. I know how much they want to play, but... shouldn't the manager be the one to say, "Hey, we need you to take it easy for a bit"? Even if he's not fully in charge of whether they're in the lineup on a given day, I'm guessing that that kind of communication should be coming from him, and it doesn't seem like it was.

Firing him now obviously feels like horrible timing given the ongoing devastation from earthquakes in Venezuela. Additionally, nothing in baseball is particularly friendly to anyone who isn't a cishet white guy; as one of the few Latino managers in the game, Mendy probably got more heat than he deserved. His ability to connect with Latino players even beyond his general likeability was one clear upside of his tenure, and not every candidate for the job is going to have that.

Having said all that, how easy will it be to replace him in a way that's productive? I don't know. Personally, I think that our position players, at least, are good enough that their struggles could be addressed by better management or different leadership—but that's only for the people who aren't injured, because we can't really control the injuries, and those have been devastating. The pitching, unfortunately, seems like a flat-out roster construction problem. So who's to say?

The first game under Green's management wasn't a resounding success, but I didn't expect it to be—I want a lot of unrealistic things out of this team, but even I don't think things are going to magically improve overnight. Then again, there were already some lineup modifications that I thought were probably good (namely letting Bo DH for a day and moving him down to the 3rd spot, as well as saying Jared Young will get a chance to prove himself at first base instead of continually relying on Vientos), the pitching changes seemed better-planned than usual, and I didn't see a ton of horrific ABS challenges, so... (Of course, as I'm finishing this up, the lineup/pitching today aren't great.)

As long as the next person didn't get their start working under Aaron Boone, I think we'll be all right.

Also, Tony Vitello should get fired next. But that's neither here nor there. Let me know what you think about these dramatic developments.