Buck Showalter is not leaving without giving his two cents.
The recently fired skipper shared some insight on how the Mets handled resting their players and the analytical data shared with him late in games during an appearance on the “Foul Territory” podcast.
“I love when those guys come in about their load management,” Showalter said Tuesday.
“We had a guy that hit a triple and two doubles and they came in and said he probably needs a day off cause he ran too much around the bases. So what do you want me to tell him, don’t get any hits, so you can play the next day? I didn’t quite understand that one. I said, ‘Ok, you go out there and tell Brandon Nimmo that he’s not playing today because he did too well last night.’”
Showalter, 67, is known to be an old-school type of manager. Load management and analytics for lifelong baseball people can sometimes fall on deaf ears, as he somewhat suggested on Tuesday.
“They present a lot of things to you but sometimes it’s a lot different in the dugout in the eighth and ninth inning when you know what’s going on mentally with a guy, emotionally with a guy,” Showalter said. “You know things that are going on on and off the field. There’s so many factors that figure into it. So the best guys that I’ve dealt with are receptive to the other part of it — they bring something I can’t bring, but the coaching staff brings something that they can’t bring just from your experiences.
“The best organizations — like Texas, you saw a great example. Their general manager [Chris Young] went to an Ivy League school but he played the game. And their manager [Bruce Bochy], there’s a great relationship there. The guys that mesh and have respect for what each one brings and don’t make any of those people feel uncomfortable in the locker room.”
Showalter was relieved of his duties as new president of baseball operations David Stearns was hired and attempted to bring a sense of freshness to a team that finished 75-87. Former Yankee bench coach Carlos Mendoza was hired as his replacement.
However, Showalter felt as if the Mets may have been postseason-bound had the club not sold off their best assets at the trade deadline.
“I still think if we stayed the course we would have slipped in [the] Wild Card. I’m always going to think that,” Showalter recalled. “They walked in and someone was saying bye to me and I looked up and said, ‘what’s going on?’’ Tommy Pham got traded. That’s the first time I knew we were abandoning ship, sorta speak. I had Max Scherzer in there that day because he was trying to make up his mind.”
