Roth: Carlos Beltran, the Mets, and a mutual parting of ways
From David Roth at Baseball Prospectus on January 16, 2020:
By the time that Carlos Beltrán stepped down as the Mets manager on Thursday afternoon, the cheating scandal that expanded to claim the reputations and careers of A.J. Hinch, Alex Cora, and Jeff Luhnow had already entered its Random Things Circled In MS Paint stage. It was going to happen, and it was going to be ridiculous when it did, but there is no other way forward through this.
You have seen what this looks like if you’ve spent any time online today; the white-noisy rush of one garbage-heavy wave crashing to shore after another might have been audible even if you hadn’t. Slow-motion videos of José Altuve clutching his jersey while rounding the bases after a game-winning homer were circulated and parsed online. A photo of Josh Reddick doing a postgame interview was given the squiggly red circle treatment around what was either tape securing a wire to his chest or a piece of celebratory confetti; Reddick’s wife Jett heatedly insisted it was the latter and signed off with #youallareidiots. A Twitter account purporting to be Beltrán’s niece perfunctorily apologized to her tio, tweeted the details of what it said was a previously unrevealed Astros cheating methodology, then deleted the tweets and then the whole account. It was shortly revealed not to have been Beltrán’s niece at all; Gary Sheffield’s son later posited that it was instead the anonymized account of a former Astros player. Mark Teixeira said Beltrán should be fired for his role in the scheme and Carlos Gomez said Teixeira was a sucker for saying it. Jessica Mendoza, an ESPN analyst who also has a vaguely proscribed consulting job with the Mets, suggested on the radio that the real tragedy of the metastasizing cheating scandal was all the snitching-ass snitches who started it, then tried to clarify it in a statement that mostly just restated the original with more of a Be That How It May tone. This is before we even get to the inevitable Bob Nightengale column. So: not great, really.
Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/56460/a-mutual-parting-of-ways-carlos-beltran-new-york-mets-wilpons/
Originally published: January 17, 2020. Last Updated: January 17, 2020.