This was early March, Port St. Lucie, a time in baseball when nothing seems impossible, when you can connect the dots all the way from spring to summer to autumn and believe every word of it.
Carlos Mendoza was connecting dots. He stood with a fungo bat in his hands in a narrow corridor inside Clover Park with a lifetime record as a major league manager of 0-0. He was replacing a manager (Buck Showalter) who’d worked 3,418 games. He was the Mets’ preferred candidate over another manager (Craig Counsell) who’d managed 1,513 of them.
Most rookie managers don’t talk the way Carlos Mendoza talked that day, as the rain fell outside at Clover. You’ve known youthful people who have “old souls?” Mendoza was an old-soul manager. He talked like a man with a couple of thousand games already under his belt.
“What I like,” he said, “is that I have a bunch of guys who want to be here, and a bunch of guys who want to play hard and play winning baseball every day. We all know there’s a right way and a wrong way to play this game, and these guys here, they’re all about the right way.”
OK. So your next question probably is: “What did you expect him to say? That we’re all excited to lose 105 ballgames this year?”
And that’s fair.
But the thing is, it wasn’t what he was saying that struck me later, after we’d shaken hands and I’d wished him luck with what was almost certainly going to be six months filled with growing pains and groaning fans.
It was how he said it.
It was the short exchanges he had with players running into the clubhouse to get out of the rain, the familiarity, the obvious respect. Francisco Lindor ambled over at one point, took one of the canes I use and playfully asked if I wanted to duel him with the other. Mendoza joked, “Go get your own canes, old man!” and Lindor roared as he dashed down the hall.
It reminded me of both Showalter and Joe Torre: the easy demeanor with which he carried himself, the obvious gravitas. And again: this was at a time when he had exactly 13 exhibition games on his résumé.
Sure, it’s easy to put that all into some kind of context now, almost seven months later, with the Mets cooling their heels as they wait for the identity of their National League Championship Series opponent to be revealed. I could lie and declare: “I saw genius in the man’s eyes and brilliance in his soul!”
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I could pretend that I didn’t post this on X on May 21 — “The #Mets are an unvarnished embarrassment right now. Goodness” — and then re-posted it three different times in the days to come. Maybe that opinion wasn’t so absurd on May 21 when they were 21-27 (and were soon to sink even deeper), but if I tell you now, “All along, I knew the skipper would pull the lads through!” you wouldn’t believe me, and shouldn’t.
Still: it was when the Mets were floundering when Mendoza truly found his footing. It was when Citi was empty and the fans were staying away and it felt like they were a good 2 ½ weeks behind the rest of the National League that Mendoza quietly rallied his guys, and it wasn’t thanks to a series of team meetings or upended clubhouse buffet tables.
“He was the same guy in May that he is now, in September,” Brandon Nimmo said not long ago.
“He believes in you without ever giving you a trace that he’s just blowing smoke up your butt,” Pete Alonso said “It’s one thing for a manager to say he has faith in you, it’s another when he encourages you in a way that you know he really believes it. And if he believes, you should too.”
Look, managing is a fickle game. Two years ago Showalter couldn’t buy a meal in any of the five boroughs or any of the suburbs, and now he bides his time on TV. Mendoza’s old boss Aaron Boone has won 58.4 percent of every game he’s ever managed, higher than (to name three out of many) Casey Stengel, Joe Torre and Billy Martin. Now, every game he works feels like a referendum on his future.
Maybe Mendoza is a one-hit wonder; that’s still in play, sure. But it’s hard to see the job he’s done and not think he has staying power in him. And not just because the Mets are only four games away from the World Series. Because for all the fine work he’s done lately he was just as on point when the Mets were only four games removed from the worst record in the National League.
