Hi.
You may remember me from such unpopular opinions as Daniel Murphy is good, Matt Harvey is bad or even Gary Cohen gets lazy with his calls.
Another unpopular opinion was my resistance of the Mickey Mafia. A lot of you have now switched sides. Welcome to The Resistance.
Back in April the Mickey Mafia was strong. If you read MP daily you know the lines here – me eyerolling Howie, the Hodges Moment, late rookies* etc.
At the end of April the Times magazine did a glowing piece on Mickey as part of #TheNarrative
If you are new, #TheNarrative is the group think that newspapers, the official SNY blog, WFAN callers and twitter all zero in on. Right now an example is that Jay Bruce is the worst person in the world. Two weeks ago it was that Nimmo of course should be an All Star (um, look at his stats will ya? .277 and 4 is your All Star? Lee Mazzilli laughs at that.)
There was also the Mickey Narrative. New culture was thrown around.
The personal touch. Now I’m reading players have tuned out.
Last night I thought about the Times piece and I thought I’d poke at it. I’ll just pull stuff out and see what your brain does with it.
The original Times piece is here if you want to reference it.
Callaway broached the subject. “I’m the three hitter,” Cespedes said, in a tone that seemed to discourage further discourse.
The article then sets the table for how great Mickey was at getting Yo to see the light and buy-in. Sounds like Yo, doesn’t it?
Collins had been given the same information by the team’s analysts. But he recognized that his team’s best hitter preferred to hit third, so he put Cespedes third and constructed the batting order around him.
Shade on Terry, setting The Narrative for Mickeys great communications skills. Hold that thought.
Callaway wrote a 7,000-word manifesto outlining his managerial vision……”
“I will always be good about having the front office’s back when it comes to players,” he wrote.
So there’s your Reyes explanation.
I thought this next line of the article was interesting, and surprised that nobody really picked up on it.
Harvey is in the final year of his contract; “If you’d asked me a year ago,” he says, “I’d have told you there was no chance that I would re-sign with the Mets.”
Whoa there’s MH telling us he was thinking as early as 2017 about leaving. Anyway that next section of the article is about the bromance between TDH and Mickey – as you know Mickey was going to fix Matt. Let me know how that worked out. We have FIVE FOUR ACES you know.
Let’s check back in on Cespedes..
One night, Callaway dropped him to third to get his bat going. He kept him there for a series with the Brewers. But when Cespedes hit a grand slam against Washington a few days later, he was batting second.
I see. He wants to bat third. He did well batting third. You dropped him to third to get him going So let’s bat him second. What?
And that’s how the article ends.
Now that we’ve talked about The Personal Touch, how about this line from a different article, from today, from the Daily News.
At the very least the perception is that his players aren’t listening to him
Wait – they aren’t listening to him? That was the whole selling point wasn’t it? What are we even doing?
The Mets are 28-36 as I write this. Let me be unfair and take the hot start off. Thats a 17-35 run. Yikes.
Back on April 13th, the Mets were 11-1. They had a 3.5 game lead over Atlanta, they now trail Atlanta by 9.5. That’s 13 games in the standings. 13 is a lot. You make up 13 games and we are in 1951 Giants and 1978 Yankees territory. I don’t think the Braves are that good, the Mets have been that bad.
The Nats? They were 6 back that day. They’ve made up 14 or so on the Mets.
We are unfortunately heading for a rebuild. We don’t know when Thor is coming back. We don’t know when Yo is coming back. They’ve finally admitted Jay Bruce is hurt. Matz was scratched today. They can’t score.
The rebuild is coming.
Do you think Mickey is truly the one to oversee it?
