Without Buck, Mets turn to 'college of coaches'

NEW YORK -- Hitting coach Eric Chavez, pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and coordinator Dick Scott stood together in the Mets’ dugout, never too far from one another throughout the team’s 5-2 loss to the Giants. Hefner called them the team’s “three-headed” monster -- a college of coaches, or perhaps a mass of managers. Whatever the phrasing, it was unorthodox; rather than have one person call the shots on Wednesday, the Mets employed three.

“There’s a lot of experience in that dugout, so there was no question we were going to be able to navigate the game,” Hefner said. “Obviously we miss Buck and his leadership, but I thought given the circumstances, we did a good job.”

Buck, of course, is Buck Showalter, who was absent from the proceedings due to a previously-scheduled medical procedure. Showalter is fine; he’ll be back on Thursday. But in the interim, the Mets needed to manage nine innings without both him and bench coach Glenn Sherlock, who has been away from the club since testing positive for COVID-19.

Why ask one man to do the job when three of them are capable? Hefner was a natural choice to join the inner circle, since he’s typically involved in pitching decisions throughout a game. Chavez, as the hitting expert, could offer opinions on that side of things. And Scott, who normally works as the Mets’ coordinator of coaching development and instruction, could serve as the glue. He had prior experience as a Minor League manager and Major League bench coach.

Before Showalter departed, he told everyone how he wanted things to unfold. But Showalter couldn’t communicate with his managers during the game itself, leaving his replacement trio to figure things out on the fly.

“The same confidence that we have in the manager, we have in every other coach that’s there,” outfielder Starling Marte said through an interpreter. “We go out there, we do the best we can on the field, and we want them to feel proud that we tried our best out there.”

On this day, the Mets’ best wasn’t quite enough, and it’s unlikely anyone -- Showalter included -- could have done much about it. The Giants were aggressive, scoring three times before pitcher Chris Bassitt could record the game’s second out. The Mets never recovered. Although Bassitt retired the final seven batters he faced, four via strikeout, he said afterward that he’s “not going to take any positives from this one.”

Still, the Mets applied enough pressure to keep things interesting during the final third of the game, scoring their first run when Marte dunked an RBI single into shallow right-center field in the seventh. But with one of New York’s hottest hitters, Francisco Lindor, at the plate, Marte bolted for second and was caught stealing to end the inning.

That decision, Marte said, came from him -- not from any one of the three interim managers. When asked about the situation afterward, Hefner said it was a better question for Chavez or Scott, who ran the offensive side of the game. A Mets spokesman declined requests to make either of those two available, citing a club public-relations decision.

Such are the complications of having multiple people manage a single game. It’s a concept not entirely dissimilar to the infamous “College of Coaches” employed by the Cubs in the early 1960s. That one was also better in theory than in practice, as the inconsistency of using eight different coaches resulted, in 1962, in the worst record in franchise history.

The Mets, of course, were employing their own coaching troika out of necessity rather than by design. At 9-4, they’re also trending toward one of the best records in franchise history, not the worst. No matter how the final five and a half months of the season unfold, the story of Chavez, Hefner and Scott won’t be more than a note in the margins, long forgotten by early October.

Still, it was an interesting diversion for a day. The Mets are confident this sort of setup can work if they ever need to use it again, even if Showalter’s impending return makes that unlikely.

“He loves being at the yard,” first baseman Pete Alonso said. “I know for him, it’s probably a little bit difficult, but I know he’s going to be right back at it again on Thursday.”