Buck Showalter was hired to manage the Mets as much for the accountability he will demand from players as his baseball acumen.
To that end, the new sheriff in Queens is already looking toward eliminating excuses from the team’s lexicon, while instilling a sense of shared commitment with the fans and city.
“Everything has got to be about the Mets,” Showalter said Tuesday during an introductory Zoom press conference to announce his hiring as manager. “It has got to be, you have got a charge to keep, with the fans, the city — people that are really living and dying with everything you do out there. It’s a great responsibility and some people run from it.”
The 65-year-old Showalter finished that comment by praising owner Steve Cohen, team president Sandy Alderson and general manager Billy Eppler for the well-respected players they have acquired this offseason, such as Starling Marte and Eduardo Escobar, while throwing shade toward last season’s clubhouse. Showalter caught himself in-between, realizing per MLB lockout rules he wasn’t supposed to discuss players by name.
“What’s really been attractive to me is watching Billy and Sandy and Steve, the type of people they have added in the offseason and in some cases they might have subtracted — sometimes your best addition is that,” Showalter said. “You look at Marte and Eduardo, and obviously I can’t mention names so I am going to shut up. I just like the way they have gone about their [offseason]. The people they have added would have been people I was interested in, too.”
The biggest question facing the former Yankees, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Orioles manager is whether he’s game for new-age baseball and the influx of information he will receive from an analytics department that has increased dramatically under Cohen’s leadership.
Showalter, unwilling to cede an advantage to opponents, said he will embrace the information and technology. It’s an approach he said he would have taken during his tenure with the Orioles (which ended in 2018) if the team had the budget for such a comprehensive undertaking.
“If somebody thinks I am going to go back to the hotel or the house and [accept] that maybe we got beat because someone else had better or used information better than we did or analytics, you don’t know me very well,” Showalter said. “I have always been spongeful with information to a fault and just like everybody else I don’t have a corner on it, there’s a lot of smart people in this game … I’m not going to talk about it — we’ll show you.”
Showalter, who placed on a Mets cap (and held up his uniform jersey No. 11) as he appeared on the Zoom call with his wife, Angela, got the job over Rays bench coach Matt Quatraro and Astros bench coach Joe Espada, the two other finalists for the position. Alderson noted that as Oakland’s GM he wanted to hire Showalter after the 1995 season, but Showalter chose the expansion Diamondbacks.
Showalter, according to Alderson, came “as close to 10 out of 10 as anybody possibly can,” as the Mets evaluated candidates for the position.
“You don’t last as long as Buck has and you don’t remain as interested in a person who has been out of the game for three years if that person hasn’t been adaptable, if that person hasn’t been curious, if that person hasn’t been able to evolve with the game itself,” Alderson said. “A lot of these issues about analytics and so forth are interesting topics, but given what Buck has done in the past, relied on as much information as has been available to him, and adaptable as he has been to the way the game has changed over time, and still be curious and energetic and motivated by the task at hand here in New York.”
The Mets have missed the playoffs the last five seasons and finished with a losing record in four of them. Showalter inherits a nucleus that includes Jacob deGrom, Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso while adding three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer to the rotation.
Addressing the issue of accountability, Showalter said his job is to put players in the best position to succeed.
“Tell me what you need from me,” Showalter said. “Tell me what you need from the staff. You try to eliminate all the possible excuses and all the sympathetic ears to the BS that won’t allow us to win baseball games. It’s not as complicated as we make it sometimes.”
Showalter also acknowledged there might be players on the roster who don’t fit the Mets.
“This is not something where you put your headphones on and say, ‘I don’t want to listen to it,’ ” Showalter said. “It’s there, but there is no place like [this] when you get it right. When you get it right, and there’s a lot of people living and dying what you do every day, so there is an accountability responsibility to it and it’s not for everybody. We’re going to try to find out who it’s for, who is in and who ain’t.”
