Let me start this discussion with a simple truism. Whenever I talk about baseball managers and the impact they make on their teams, I conjure up my late mother, who used to always quote Casey Stengel.
“Stan, Casey always said you’ve got to have the horses.”
But there are managers who walk into a clubhouse and immediately command the room and make a difference. The 2010 Baltimore Orioles were a pretty lousy baseball team, or so it seemed. A team that had gone 233-354 in their previous 587 games (a winning percentage of .397) suddenly, with the same players, went 34-26 in their last 60 games of the 2010 season under Buck Showalter.
But a similar cast of characters went 69-93 in 2011. Yes, you’ve got to have the horses indeed. President of baseball operations Andy MacPhail decided to take a break following the 2011 season. The Orioles plucked out a dark-horse candidate in Dan Duquette to replace him. With just a few smart moves and the growth of some talented ballplayers, the Orioles went on to have a wonderful return to relevance from 2012-2016.
It all inevitably fell apart on equal parts dysfunction, poor decision-making and the lack of a real long-term game plan. But make no mistake about it — when given the horses, Showalter is as good a field manager that has ever been in the dugout.
Even for a good baseball person, to get two chances to manage a major league team isn’t too common. That manager must have shown something in his first job that caught the eye of someone in a position to hire him. For a big league manager to get a third try at running a team — well, you only have to count your fingers and toes to name them all in the history of the majors. For a manager to get hired a fourth time, like Showalter in Baltimore, that is pretty rarified air.
After Showalter was let go by the Orioles along with Duquette, the chances of Showalter getting back on the field as a skipper seemed slim. For it to happen, it would take a nearly perfect storm of a team capable of winning and an owner who believed an increase in payroll should be paired an experienced and shrewd baseball man.
The perfect storm hit when the Wilpon family sold their long-held Mets to New York financier Steve Cohen following the 2020 season. The Mets then had a disappointing 77-85 season in 2021, costing Luis Rojas his job as manager. Cohen announced the Showalter hire on Twitter in December 2021.
The media is like a kettle drum in New York City. Cohen may have come to the conclusion that Showalter was the right manager for him without the drum, but whether he thought that or not, he knew he would have been blistered from the start if he had brought in anyone else.
Cohen has since gone on a spending spree rarely seen in the annals of the game. Here are the Mets’ last three payrolls under Cohen, according to Spotrac, which tracks player contracts. This does not include the crazy luxury tax the team is paying:
2021: $201,189,189
2022: $268,292,506
2023: $344,009,641
Ahead of the 2022 season, the Mets brought in pitchers Max Scherzer, Chris Bassitt and Adam Ottavino and outfielders Mark Canha and Starling Marte. There were also plenty of in-season additions as well.
All these free-agent and trade acquisitions joined an already talented nucleus that included starting pitchers Jacob deGrom and Carlos Carrasco, infielders Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil, outfielder Brandon Nimmo and closer extraordinaire Edwin Díaz.
The dream duo of deGrom and Scherzer never really worked out — deGrom only pitched 64.1 innings in 2022 — but Showalter led the Mets to 101-61 regular-season record.
After a first-round elimination by the 89-win San Diego Padres, Cohen was not deterred. More big names were brought in, mostly to stabilize the rotation: Justin Verlander, José Quintana and Japanese right-hander Kodai Senga. To say the Mets and their fans were optimistic about 2023 would perhaps be the understatement of the year.
Surely, the best team money could buy would really be as good as it was planned to be. Not so fast.
It all started in the World Baseball Classic, when Díaz suffered a torn right patellar tendon celebrating a Team Puerto Rico victory. He was ruled out for the season.
Additionally, Verlander didn’t debut until early May and Quintana didn’t debut until after the All-Star break. The hitting has been pretty disastrous all season long, with Alonso, Lindor, McNeil, Marte and Nimmo all mired in down years.
All of this began to really spin out of control before the All-Star Game, and the Mets made the decision to start to retool and try to rebuild on the run. Scherzer, Verlander, Canha, outfielder Tommy Pham and relievers David Robertson and Dominic Leone were all gone before the trade deadline.
Orioles fans caught a glimpse of the current Mets this weekend and if you thought they were bad 10 days ago, now they are 0-for-August, having lost all six games they have played since the Aug. 1 deadline.
Let’s circle back to how this impacts Showalter. Well, Cohen said all the right things after the sell-off concluded.
“I don’t put it on Buck. I put it on the players,” he said.
But the reality of this team for this year is so ugly. They appeared outmanned and out-efforted during the three-game sweep by the Orioles. And this isn’t going to get any better this season. In fact, it could end the way Earl Weaver’s last season in Baltimore ended in 1986. That club on was 59-47 on Aug. 5 — just 2.5 games out of first place — before finishing 14-42. Even the great Earl Weaver wasn’t immune to losing his job.
In what must have been a bittersweet return to the city that always had his back, Showalter got to witness the celebration of the Orioles’ last World Series championship in 1983. A World Series ring has proven ever-elusive for Showalter.
Showalter also had to suffer the added indignity that the team he skippered so successfully for most of his decade in Charm City is now on the precipice of a great and lengthy run.
I really hope I am wrong about how I am seeing this movie play out and somehow his team gets in gear and can save his job.
But after watching his team for three games, Showalter simply doesn’t have the horses.
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox