Not much going on lately, but here’s something of interest!
The New York Mets filled their manager role this weekend by hiring veteran skipper Buck Showalter.
Showalter has 20 years of experience as a big-league manager with the Yankees, Diamondbacks, Rangers, and, most recently, the Orioles. He’s known around these parts, of course, as the guy who left Zack Britton in the bullpen while Edwin Encarnacion launched a ball into space off of Ubaldo Jimenez to walk off the O’s in the 2016 American League Wild-Card game.
Anyways, this is worth noting because there was a ‘rumour’ going around earlier this month that Pete Walker was a name to watch in New York’s managerial search.
This was actually just a Tweet from Jon Morosi saying Walker was a ‘name to watch’ because he’s respected in baseball, so it really wasn’t anything more than pure speculation. But if you were one of the ones to take it seriously and demand Walker get promoted into Charlie Montoyo’s gig before it was too late, you can now exhale.
Also! One more interesting Blue Jays-ish thing from the Mets… On SNY, a New York sports channel, Todd Zeile (an analyst and former player) talked about the impact that Showalter would have on the Mets’ clubhouse culture and also mentioned that Marcus Stroman was one of the team’s most divisive players last season and him leaving in free agency might be a positive for the Mets’ chmistry.
(The quote comes at 4:24 of the clip…)
That’s certainly a vague description and doesn’t offer us much, if any, insight as to what was going on, but the Mets were an absolute mess last year, as highlighted by the time they were doing thumbs down gestures to their own fans in response to them being booed. There were obviously many, many more problems on the roster, but it isn’t shocking to hear that he might have been one of them.
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