Earlier this season, a club executive lamented the practice of firing staffers early in a season, which, he believes, makes a franchise look ridiculous. You spend many hours together in meetings during the offseason, evaluating players and developing plans, and then you have two months together in spring training.
"Then you have a few bad weeks and you fire a guy?" he asked rhetorically. "What you're really saying is that your process was [flawed]. If you're ready to fire someone in April or May, then that means you had doubts about him during the winter, and you should've made your move then.
"It just comes off as an excuse, finger-pointing."
But that's where the New York Mets might be soon. Both current buzz and Mets history suggest Mickey Callaway's job is in jeopardy, and with one more bad stretch of game results, he might be on the way out. And let's be clear about this: Word about this sort of stuff emanates from the Mets more than any team in baseball, and an in-season firing of Callaway would be in keeping with a long-standing Mets tradition.
The list of Mets managers let go in the middle of the schedule over the past 30 years is impressive: Davey Johnson, Bud Harrelson, Jeff Torborg, Dallas Green and Willie Randolph, with Randolph infamously fired in the middle of the night after he'd flown with the team to the West Coast. And this doesn't even count Terry Collins, who was a dead man walking in his job through leaks and infighting for the better part of two years.
The Mets' practice of using the managers as human shields to absorb attention, criticism and barbed headlines doesn't stop with the skippers. During an interleague series with the Yankees in 1999, the Mets conducted their own version of a Saturday night massacre, firing pitching coach Bob Apodaca, hitting coach Tom Robson and bullpen coach Randy Niemann -- part of the ongoing struggle between general manager Steve Phillips and manager Bobby Valentine.
Phillips, of course, was installed during the 1997 season, wresting power away from Joe McIlvaine. Omar Minaya, one of Phillips' successors, was let go during the summer of 2010. Sandy Alderson was the GM from 2010 through last year, when he was moved aside -- yep, in the middle of the season. That's how the Mets' ownership rolls, and that's probably what's going to happen with Mickey Callaway, or maybe some coaches.
After the team hired Brodie Van Wagenen as GM, he moved aggressively and talked up the Mets' strength and chances, but so far they've been mediocre, and on Thursday they lost a series to the struggling Washington Nationals.
Somebody will get tossed overboard, somebody will be blamed, and Callaway might well be the fall guy, although there is no real evidence his work is among the team's primary issues.
Van Wagenen spent major resources, in dollars and prospects, to land 36-year-old Robinson Cano in the winter after the infielder served a half-season suspension for performance-enhancing drugs. To date, Cano has not performed, hitting .257 with a .307 OBP. At his best, Cano has wrecked offspeed pitches, but this year he has struggled terribly against breaking balls and changeups, perhaps because, like a lot of older players, he's more cognizant of catching up with fastballs. That Cano rebounds is not only a big concern for the 2019 Mets; it's an enormous issue for the Mets of next year and beyond, because this is Year 1 of the five years the team assumed in Cano's contract.
The Mets signed Wilson Ramos, who turns 32 this summer, to a multiyear deal, and he has a slugging percentage of .311 and isn't moving well. They signed 35-year-old Jed Lowrie to a two-year deal; he got hurt and suffered a setback and hasn't been on the field yet.
The baseball industry has gravitated hard and fast toward younger players, and the Mets' offseason was mostly a pursuit of older players who, to date, haven't performed as expected. That's the Mets' biggest problem -- that's why they're under .500. They have been largely propped up by young players Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil, who seemingly were roadblocked by the winter acquisitions.
It's still early and the NL East is much more of a mud bog than anybody expected, with the Nationals taken down by disastrous bullpen work and the Braves still sorting through their pitching.
But the Mets have not performed to expectations, and because the organization's long-standing reflex has been to fire somebody in the midst of a season, Callaway might go. It's Callaway's first shot at managing, and being dumped would sting. But, over time, he probably would achieve the same emotion that many others let go by the Mets eventually get to: relief at leaving the chaos behind.