Reflections as Mets' post-Mendoza era gets underway

This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

TORONTO -- The Mets have now played six games without Carlos Mendoza and are 2-4 in those contests. One can draw no grand conclusions from that sample. If the team’s recent track record says anything, it’s simply what most Mets types, including those at the highest levels of the organization, already believed: Mendoza was not the problem.

President of baseball operations David Stearns didn’t see Mendoza as the club’s primary issue any more than his players in the clubhouse did. That’s not to suggest Mendoza is blameless in what’s occurred over the past 13 months. It's just to lay bare the reality that Mendoza's dismissal wasn't due to his personal flaws so much as to a systemic organizational failure.

This was on the players and on the front office and Stearns, as all those parties admitted in the days following Mendoza's ouster.

“I failed Mendy,” shortstop Francisco Lindor said in one of the most cutting quotes to come out of the clubhouse last week. He added: “At the end of the day, this is not about him. It’s more on us, the players, that we didn’t perform to our capabilities.”

Those weren’t the same types of comments that surfaced after the dismissals of Buck Showalter or Luis Rojas or Mickey Callaway or even Terry Collins. They were the comments of a team that felt it had let down its leader -- not the other way around.

Yet a reality of Major League Baseball is that for several reasons, it’s a lot easier to fire managers than it is to move on from top players or GMs. Stearns will be here next year. Lindor will probably be here too, alongside many other underperforming Mets. The team cannot churn its entire roster in a year.

As owner Steve Cohen put it in recent comments to the New York Post, Stearns’ track record has been mixed since arriving before the 2024 season, but he’ll at least get another Draft, another Trade Deadline and another offseason to prove he can untangle the mess he helped create. Unlike Mendoza, Stearns will have a chance to correct his mistakes. While the president of baseball operations’ reputation has taken a hit, Cohen spent years hoping to land him for this role. He wooed Stearns with a lavish, five-year contract. The owner is not about to default on that now, especially with no obvious better replacement at large.

As for Mendoza, his days in baseball are surely not done. Well-liked in the clubhouse and around Citi Field, Mendoza navigated the challenges of being a first-time manager in New York City with grace. While no Mets skipper since Bobby Valentine has managed again after leaving New York, Mendoza, at age 46, stands a reasonable chance of being the next one to do so.

That’s because largely, this wasn’t Mendoza’s fault -- something upon which Cohen, Stearns, Lindor and others can all agree. Regardless, the Mets will move on without him.