Mets Finally Get It Right Hiring Luis Rojas
The right man for the Mets managerial job was Luis Rojas. That was true the day the team fired Mickey Callaway, the day they hired Carlos Beltran, and once again, the day they fired Beltran.
Rojas has been a minor league manager in the Mets system for seven years, and he was the quality control manager this past season. He has the respect of everyone in the organization, the deepest of roots in the game, and he has had a hand in the success of the core of this Mets roster.
In his time in the minors, he’s managed current Mets players Pete Alonso, Michael Conforto, Jacob deGrom, Luis Guillorme, Jeff McNeil, Brandon Nimmo, Amed Rosario, Dominic Smith, and others.
He’s also managed prospects like Andres Gimenez who could debut this upcoming season. Overall, this speaks not just to Rojas’ knowledge of the personnel, but also his ability to get the most out of these players.
This is why it’s being widely reported this is a very popular hire in the Mets clubhouse. It should be a popular hire with everyone.
This is a manager from the Alou family tree. That’s important with his father Felipe Alou being a longtime manager, and his brother, Moises Alou, having played for the Mets. With them, he not only had someone to lean on in terms of managing a team, but also, on the unique challenges of New York. Of course, Rojas can lean on his own experiences for that as well.
As the Quality Control Coach, he’s well versed in analytics, and he’s had communication with the front office about using them, and also, what the front office expectations are. He’s also spent the past year further developing and strengthening relations with everyone in the clubhouse, and really, the entire organization.
Lost in the shuffle last year was Rojas working with McNeil to become an everyday outfielder. In 2019, McNeil was an All-Star, and he had a 2 DRS in the outfield.
When you break it down, this is a hard working individual who is able to get the most out of the players on this team. With his being bilingual, he can talk baseball in any language. No matter what angle you look at this from, Rojas was the perfect hire for this team. That goes double when you consider he’s one of the few holdovers from Callaway’s staff at a time the Mets desperately need some continuity.
Overall, the Mets took a terrible situation, and they made the most of it hiring the person who very likely should have been hired in November. Rojas is the best man for this job, and the 2020 Mets will be better for having him at the helm.
Interesting MD, I said I thought it would be him over the weekend. I also said, as I did when Beltran was hired, that I felt this was a spot for a veteran manager, but that this front office would not hire one of the big names. Now that they’ve made the wrong move twice, I’m thinking, this might just work.
The man has clearly prepared his entire life for this. He has the 100% support of the core group. As you see Alonso, again, is out in front of this and having played for Rojas his voice resonates louder and having his loyalty is 1/2 the battle. The rest is the veterans and Rojas has Cano which pretty much settles the other 1/2. Now can he manage?
Sometimes forces beyond our control just get it right. I’d bet we have a better chance of getting it right by luck or the hand of the BB gods than if it was just Brodie and Jeffy making the decision.
Rojas is coming in to manage an old team. The Mets were older than the NL average in 2019, and with their offseason additions, all of them post-prime, they only got older. They also shed none of their old players, and added no regulars who are pre-prime. For all the talk about Rojas’ experience with Mets players who came up through their minor league system, let’s hope he can deal with an old ballclub.
Let’s see. Ages on Opening Day with JD in LF and McNeil at 3B:
32, 25, 37, 24, 28, and in the OF it’s… 27, 27, 27.
The average is 28.375. 28.77 if deGrom starts. If you wanted to go with the median, that’s 27.
If the Mets have their way and it’s Lowrie at 3B and NcNeil in LF, the average age is 29.5. 29.77 if deGrom starts. The median moves to 28, but I don’t know that the median is more representative here since the ages below it are 24, 25, 27, 27, while the ages above the median are 32, 32, 36, 37. That’s 25 years above the median, but only 9 years below it. 25 years of increasingly brittle bones, leathery ligaments, of tendons drying out, creaking, ossifying…
Imagine that. The average age of the Mets team on Opening Day may well be almost 30, and closing in on 31 if Cespedes gets the nod. Yet on most sites fans refer to this as a “young” team. What can they be thinking?
They’re looking at the young core and making it out to be the whole team.
Someone said Cespedes looks fat in the video of him doing ‘sprints’ on a field and hitting in a cage.
The excess weight is evident particularly when he’s hitting. He’s got that 10 pound gut hanging a little off to one side that the loose shirt and his overall, fullback build tends to hide.
It’s one more reason to figure he won’t contribute much, at least not in the NL, and there’s no reason for it. He had millions and millions of reasons not to have the gut, not to have the thick middle–but that’s what he chose. Does he look like he can still get around on 97 mile an hour fastballs? Better hitters than Cespedes work like dogs and diet year round to stay in shape and still can’t cut it at 34. It’s worth remembering, too, that he only had the one great year, only one season worth more than 4 bWAR and that was in 2015. His career OBP is a weak .328, and that was when he could run.
Maybe with the 26 man roster the Mets can put him in Rusty Staub’s old role in his second go-round with the team, as their pinch hitter *de luxe* who gets one to two hundred plate appearances over the year and always gets pinch run for. Cespedes doesn’t walk enough, though, to make that a likely proposition. Still, it’d be interesting if he can hit and can’t run much, to see him as the Mets DH in interleague games and otherwise get a pinch hitting appearance in 120 games, almost as a matter of course late in games. If they can’t trade him, that might be a much better course than trying to get him into games in LF when the Mets have the JD / Dom platoon ready to go.
You raise an interesting point. We see Cespedes being able to do things, but we have no idea how he could withstand a game let alone a 162 game schedule.