Reese Kaplan -- Are Little Steps are Better Than No Steps at All?

Problem solving is a key skill to apply to any endeavor in life.  Some people excel at it, some are confounded by it and others are somewhere in between.  

Friday manager Buck Showalter held a closed door meeting with his team to outline what was going wrong, what needs to be done better and how losers will be held accountable for what they did to contribute to the outcomes of games slipping further and further away.

Good speech...if it made sense at all.  Unfortunately it did not.

Don't get me wrong.  It was fantastic on Saturday night to see the Mets ride Kodai Senga's pitching, Mark Canha's hitting and Brandon Nimmo's defense to a much needed victory after a week of nothing but losing.  You can't take away that W away from the Mets.  

However, what was missing was the execution of what was said in Friday's meeting.  Do you remember that part about how the price to pay for incompetence was accountability?  Well, what happened there?

After the loss on Friday night the Mets dug deep into their roster to make examples out of the key reasons for all of that horrific losing.  It wasn't the starting pitching.  It wasn't the non-exist DH.  It wasn't the substandard hitting almost completely across the board.  No, none of those seemingly critical reasons could justify what was happening.

Instead the Mets felt the root cause of everything that had gone wrong was embodied in the 25th and 26th member of the major league roster -- oft-injured 36 year old righthander Tommy Hunter was Designated for Assignment.  Then to make an even more crucial change, they demoted lefty Zach Muckenhirn back to Syracuse.  

Before you stop scratching your heads and in a cacophonous attempted harmony sing out, "Who?" allow me to bear the replacement news.  In place of on-again/off-again injury-waiting-to-happen Hunter the Mets get the return of also oft-injured right hander John Curtiss.  He's no stranger to the Mets though his number of appearances have been greatly limited due to his health.  On the positive side he has a career ERA of 3.79 but without the stability of consistent health you never know what you're going to get.

On the southpaw side, replacing 28 year old rookie Muckenhirn is equally young 28 year old lefthanded reliever Josh Walker.  Despite his career perfect 0.00 ERA due to a brief one game callup earlier in the year, he's posted a 4.79 ERA across his minor league career which actually benefitted from 2023's 1.45 performance in Syracuse.  This roster change is potentially more enticing than the right handed one.

However, when you return to the accountability theme of the Showalter sermon on Friday, you really have to wonder in retrospect what it truly meant.  Neither Hunter nor Muckenhirn were the key problems the club needed to solve.  Not to dismiss the quality of neither Curtiss nor Walker, neither of them would carry the weight of the addition of one of the many quality relievers on other teams allegdly available in trade.

You remember trades, right?  It's that peculiar transaction when you send players from your team over to another in exchange for players they deem no longer fit onto their roster.  The Mets have not engaged in this long forgotten maneuver since acquiring a ruffian of sorts back in 2022.  Consequently you have to wonder what Billy Eppler is doing to improve the team.

Steve Cohen has made conciliatory noises that he's not going to explode as was predicted but you do have to wonder what level of poor performance will be tolerated until REAL changes are made -- ones that involve names bigger than Curtiss and Walker.