Mike's Mets - More Baseball, Less Drama Please

 

By Mike Steffanos February 17, 2021

I woke up this morning with a smile on my face. For a baseball nerd, the first day of training camp is always special. Sure, after a couple of weeks spring training gets boring, and you find yourself pining for the regular season to start. But this year, with so many new faces around, even the spring games will be more fun than usual. In any case, it's not just about baseball coming back. As I get older, I find myself with drastically diminishing patience for winter to pack up and ship out. The start of spring training offers an early promise that warm weather will eventually return to the icy northeast. With another crappy weather forecast for tomorrow, you take all of the hope you can find.

I have to confess that I had originally intended to take today off from blogging. I had a lot on my plate today, and I figured it was too early on in camp for anything of significance to happen. Then I saw the article on The Athletic about the firing last month of Ryan Ellis, who had worked as a hitting coordinator for the Mets. That definitely stole some of the joy and lightness I was feeling. While this was undeniably an important story, I have to admit that I was a little ticked at The Athletic for choosing to publish this on the first day of camp. Was the reporting really just completed, or did they purposely wait for the start of camp to grab a little extra attention?

Even the title of the piece felt a bit disingenuous to me. They used the quote "This is a pattern," which made it sound like they were accusing the club of an ongoing pattern, linking the previous stories. It was actually a quote from one of the complainants against Ellis, speaking about his pattern of behavior. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but the timing of the piece and that liberty with the title felt a bit like piling on.

Either way, it's an important story and has to be dealt with. Tim Britton, the Mets beat writer at The Athletic, wrote a piece about the necessity of changing the reality around the team. He included the Ellis situation with Jared Porter's firing and the recent revelations about former manager Mickey Callaway as part of the off-the-field perception that the Mets have to address. Britton is exactly right. The primary reason that bad behavior towards women should no longer be tolerated is so these women don't have to work in a toxic environment any longer, and I don't want to minimize that. But it's also important to stop the bleeding of the negative stories if the club hopes to change its culture and the perception of the organization from the outside.

What's especially disturbing about this is that the Mets apparently investigated allegations against Ellis and Calloway during the same period in 2018 and tried to basically sweep them under the rug with some sort of mild discipline and "counseling." That's a time-honored approach for an organization to look like it's being proactive and dealing with an issue when they're really just covering their corporate ass. It's still fair to note that this all happened under previous ownership and their former GM.

According to the story, the Mets "quietly" terminated Ellis last month after "new information" about the former hitting coordinator came to light. My strong suspicion is that the new information was Alderson asking the HR department if any other potential embarrassments were still working for the team after Jared Porter received the old heave-ho. My firm hope is that there isn't another one of these stories waiting to be published on opening day.

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