The Crane Pool Forum

I'm going to guess.... Joe Maddon.

As good a guess as any

I don't have any guesses

Willie Randolph.

Willie seemed to make people uptight. I admire his dignity but he wasn't right for a winning club.

Edgardo Antonio Alfon(z)o, Professional Bench Coach

Whoever it is I feel will likely have MFY bonafides , so I'll go with Tony Pena

I've been wondering of late when it was that the bench coach became the de facto first lieutenant. There was a time when, if a team had a bench coach, his main role was legend-in-residence like Willie Mays (and later, Bob Gibson) with the Mets, and Yogi Berra with the Yankees. He presumably helped drill the team and all in pre-game practices, but if he had an in-game role, it was to look serious, representing major league gravitas to the players, and occasionally to take aside a player who was being a big baby and yell at him, so the manager didn't need to distract himself with that shit. The first lieutenant — and the guy most likely to get the lineup card if the manager was ejected — was generally considered to be the third-base coach. The guy didn't even have a title — he was just "Coach" in the program and the media guide. The notion of "Bench Coach" as a distinctive title evolved from that.

I don't know when the change was — somewhere between 1985 and 1995, I guess — and now, every team has a BC, most having had experience skippering a big-league club themselves, and virtually all of them are understood to be the next in line if the manager is ejected or is unavailable for a game. But it wasn't always that way, kids! In fact, I'm pretty sure that, as late as 1999, when Bobby Valentine snuck into the dugout in disguise, his pitching coach Dave Wallace was nominally in charge.

I don't want Willie.
If I'm Mendoza, I'm not sure I want a bench coach who not only has been a major league manager, but someone who did it with the Mets.
I would feel every move would be under a microscope. So I would manage conservatively when it comes to steals, hit and run, pitching changes, etc., not knowing when the first "We shoulda' re-signed Willie" calls would start coming in to WFAN.
It would be a pure recipe for second guessing.
This isn't saying it won't happen with any other ex- manager, but I think it would be worse with Willie.
Pass.

Later

It's pretty typical for a first-time MLB manager to have a former manager as his second.

Jerry Narron

Willie Randolph: worst fucking manager the Mets ever had and I fucking loathed him from about his first week on the job until the day he was finally fucking fired. Good fucking riddance. Inherited the best middle of the order in all of baseball and all he wanted to do was bunt his way onto the scoreboard. In the first inning. Of every fucking game. With a leadoff hitter that was the fastest player in all of baseball and with the best 3-4-5 in the game.

Randolph did the dumbest thing I ever saw a manager do in all of my life of watching baseball games. In mile-high Denver, against the Rockies (natch!) where you should assume, before you even make out the fucking lineup card, that you're gonna need about eight runs to win a game, because it's fucking Denver, that fucking jackass sac bunted Jose Reyes from second base to third base. In the first inning! With Reyes having reached second base leading off the game. The fastest runner in the game. So fast that Reyes was the likeliest runner in all of baseball to score from second base without the ball leaving the infield. So now, the jackass has to hope that his awesome 3-4-5 middle of the order of Beltran, Wright and Delgado doesn't hit a homer. Because if they homer, he's made to look like a jackass,which he was, for wasting an out given that Reyes woulda scored anyway without having to give away an out on account of the homer. Not that the jackass had the capacity to work this all out in his head and figure out what he hadda hope for so as not to look like a jackass. Because he was a jackass playing one run baseball in the first inning of a game being played in Denver. Fucking Denver! In the first inning. The highest scoring inning of all of them. Because your best hitters come to bat in the first inning. Because you craft your lineup for the first inning and you know who's coming to bat.

When the Mets won the division in 2006, I went into semi-depression, knowing that this idiot would get undeserving credit for the feat and that it would take at least another year and a half to ax him.

Willie Randolph inherited a Ferrari of a baseball team and he put training wheels on it. Where the hell is VicSage to chime in with some Wee Willie Small Balls snark?

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2023 2:52 pm Willie seemed to make people uptight. I admire his dignity but he wasn't right for a winning club.

Lots of chatter about it.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/14/sports/wi ... ssibility/

https://www.nj.com/mets/2023/11/mets-ca ... nager.html

I think you'll find that snark only distorts the matter. Plenty of good data can be brought to bear with regard to Randolph's tenure.

But he isn't being considered for manager, for what that's worth.

Like the Mets W-L record under Randolph? If the Mets won x games with that jackass managing, they would've won more than x games with an average manager. The Mets won despite Randolph, not because of him. Also, one can make the reasonably plausible case that no Mets manager inherited a better squad out of the box than Randolph.

One indeed can, no doubt.

I'll throw out the name of... carlos beltran.

though i do like the idea of fonzie.

Edgy MD wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2023 4:39 pm I've been wondering of late when it was that the bench coach became the de facto first lieutenant.

I feel like the Joe Torre/Don Zimmer dynamic of the late 90's MFYs was the benchmark for this relationship.

Sickening memories, but a lot of the truth to it.

Chavez and Barnes back

The Mets hit better with Chavez as the hitting coach vs Chavez as the bench coach

That's certainly hard to dispute. This is certainly what I'd've hoped for, and would've advocated for if I thought it was meaningfully likely that the organization would be too proud to reverse course on a promotion decision maneuver.

If I recall correctly, Barnes' promotion was largely a reaction to the notion that other teams were interested in him as (head) hitting coach, so they moved him up to keep from losing him.

I guess after last season, there is less demand and/or less concern that he would be a big loss if he did jump.

Path seems clear for Nevin now

Nevin means "little saint" in Irish. It is a derivative of Mac Cnáimhín.

So, you know, there's that.

Years ago, I wouldn't have felt comfortable hiring people with only AL coaching experience because of the difference in strategy when only the AL had the DH. But now that both leagues play with the same rules, I not so concerned about differences with in-game decisions.
As for Nevin, I'm sure Al Leiter has memories of him. He wore out Al "pretty good".

Later