That whole 2019 Mets hitting coach business, huh? It was a bit of a circus, wasn’t it? Chili Davis was in, then he was out pretty quick, and Tom Slater took over for a bit as the interim guy. And then, if you can believe it, Chili was actually back in the dugout for the 2020 season! Just wild stuff, if you ask me.
You sit there as a fan, or even just someone who follows the game a little, and you’re probably scratching your head, thinking, ‘What in the world are they actually doing over there?’ You see the players slumping, the team’s not getting the big hits, and it always feels like the hitting coach is the first one to get the axe. Such an easy target, I suppose. Everyone’s looking for that quick fix, that magic bullet to turn things around.
Why it all felt so familiar to me
Now, why do I bring this up with such, let’s call it, ‘first-hand understanding’? Well, it just so happens that around that same time, back in 2019 and the year or so before, I was stuck in this job. And let me tell you, the way management kept changing things up there made the Mets’ coaching decisions look like a perfectly calm merry-go-round ride.
It felt like we’d get a new department head, or some new team lead, almost every six months. And every single one of them, they’d come marching in with a brand new, revolutionary plan. The old plan we were just getting used to? Straight in the trash. Those projects we were already halfway through? Yeah, either scrap ’em entirely or ‘re-evaluate’ them, which basically meant they were doomed to die a slow, painful death in committee. One guy wanted us all-in on ‘synergy workshops’ and team-building retreats, the next one came in demanding ‘hyper-focused individual output’ and daily reports on everything. It was absolutely dizzying.
My ‘practice’ during that whole period, my day-to-day, was basically just learning to bob and weave like a boxer. You’d just about get your bearings with one particular approach, maybe even start making some decent headway on something, and then BAM, a new boss would appear, a totally new philosophy would be announced, and a whole bunch of new buzzwords would start flying around. Honestly, you ended up spending more time trying to figure out what the new NEWEST direction was supposed to be than actually getting any solid work done. It was incredibly exhausting, and if I’m being honest, pretty demoralizing for everyone involved.
- You’d constantly get conflicting instructions from different people.
- Nobody ever seemed to know who was really in charge of the bigger picture.
- And team morale? Yeah, that was mostly through the floor, as you can imagine.
So, when I’d pick up the sports pages or scroll online and read about the Mets and all their hitting coach drama, I wasn’t just seeing batting averages or some bland manager quotes. Nope. I was pretty much seeing my own office chaos playing out on a baseball field. I’d sit there thinking, ‘Those poor players. One guy tells them to focus on one thing, then he’s suddenly gone, and another guy comes in with a totally different approach to hitting.’ How is anyone supposed to find any kind of consistency or build confidence in an environment like that?
It’s really never just about whether a particular coach is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when you see these kinds of situations unfold. Sometimes, it’s much more about the chaos coming from the top, the constant shifting of priorities, the glaring lack of a clear, stable vision for everyone to follow. And when you’re caught right in the middle of all that, whether you’re a player trying to hit a 95 mph fastball or just an employee trying to finish a project report, it just grinds you down. You start to just expect things to blow up or change direction again at any moment.
So yeah, that 2019 Mets hitting coach saga. For me, it wasn’t just another quirky baseball story. It felt like looking in a mirror, reflecting a lot of what I was going through. And let me tell you, it didn’t make for pretty viewing, whether it was happening on the baseball field or in the office.