Mets manager Carlos Mendoza seeks extra charge in his electric 2024 performance
Mets manager Carlos Mendoza speaks during a spring training news conference in Port St. Lucie, Fla. on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — The previous Mets manager to make the playoffs in his first season was fired at the end of the second.
Buck Showalter won 101 games during that Flushing debut, came within a tiebreaker of winning the NL East and earned himself a fourth Manager of the Year award. Then Showalter found himself on the wrong side of a regime change at Citi Field, and in one of the stranger baseball things I’ve ever witnessed, wound up announcing his own dismissal on the final day of the regular season.
Even for a franchise that’s spent most of its history in the Twilight Zone, the Showalter Episode was a bizarre twist. But without Buck getting the hasty boot, the Mets don’t have Carlos Mendoza at the helm for last season’s rebound for the ages, and I’m not sure any other manager in baseball possibly could have executed that “0-5 to OMG” ride (hat tip to Gary Cohen) any better.
The moral of the story? Life happens fast at this level, and yesterday’s success can have little to no bearing on the future, unless it involved a Commissioner’s Trophy caravan through the Canyon of Heroes.
The Mets got close in Mendoza’s first season, and ultimately way further than anyone would have dreamed when they sat 11 games under .500 in early June. Not bad for what was marketed as a six-month “evaluation” period, when Mendoza instead helped flip the script at Citi and turn a scheduled rebuild into a Renaissance period for the newly rebranded Mets.
Now comes the hard part.
As a Mets official once told me a while back, not long after his removal, the easiest job in the world is taking over a Flushing team with zero expectations. And while I wouldn’t suggest Mendoza was operating with that low of a bar heading into his rookie season — he was piloting a $347 million payroll, after all — the theme was more about staying competitive by September than thinking playoffs in October.
Well, those days are long over. Almost overnight, Mendoza — a longtime Bronx product — is back to feeling championship pressure in pinstripes, only now they’re royal blue instead of navy. The Mets rallied last season once they hit rock bottom and finally agreed to play like they had nothing to lose. They don’t have that luxury this time around, especially after owner Steve Cohen just spent $765 million on Juan Soto this winter, and when the stakes are raised to that degree, the heat gets turned up, and it can be difficult to predict the impact.
“We’re here to win a championship,” Mendoza said during Tuesday’s opening news conference at Clover Park. “That’s the goal. But we also understand there’s a lot of good teams out there. We got to go out and do it.”
To the Mets’ credit, they stretched the eventual champion Dodgers to a sixth game in the NLCS, one more than Mendoza’s former team was able to do in the World Series. And they accomplished it with a pieced-together rotation that didn’t feature a Cy Young winner or any $100 million starters (not to mention a lineup without Soto or two-time MVP Aaron Judge).
But now Mendoza is the manager with Soto, and Cohen did him another solid by bringing back homegrown slugger Pete Alonso on the eve of spring training — ratcheting up the title hopes even higher. Mendoza tried to shrug off any talk of that Tuesday by saying those sky-high expectations are all “external” forces that won’t penetrate his team’s mindset for as long as they focus on the task at hand.
That’s the philosophy anyway. Once the lights come on, and the first pitch is thrown, the reality tends to be something different. One big advantage for Mendoza? He’s already laid the foundation with most of this roster, and done the heavy lifting communication-wise in terms of relationship-building. This is a group that’s proved it will not only play hard for him, but overachieve in critical situations, and those are the teams most difficult to beat. Everyone who recommended Mendoza for this gig insisted those player connections would be among his greatest strengths, and we’d expect those bonds to get even stronger in Year Two.
“Every day, I feel like every time I come over here, I’m looking for ways to get better,” Mendoza said.
By digging out of last year’s mile-deep hole, in what we believe to be baseball’s most highly scrutinized fish bowl, that should have earned Mendoza the Manager of the Year honors. But it was the Brewers’ Pat Murphy who cruised to the trophy, earning 27 of the 30 first-place votes, only to get pantsed by Mendoza’s wild-card, 89-win Mets in the first round of the playoffs.
Since it’s a regular-season award, Mendoza’s October upsets — he also stomped the rival Phillies in the Division Series — didn’t factor into the MOY voting. But when the games mattered most, from that final-day doubleheader in Atlanta, Mendoza’s Mets always seemed to find a way. A large part of that is talent, but winning consistently is a product of culture, and now it’s up to Mendoza & Co. to grow that all over again, planting those seeds over the next six-plus weeks.
“You just take it one day at a time,” Mendoza said. “Not looking too far ahead.”
Spoken like a manager who’s seen rock bottom in Flushing — and used it as a springboard to October. All Mendoza has to do now is get back there, and after what we’ve seen from him so far, there’s no reason to expect otherwise.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
