Mets owner Steve Cohen threaded a management needle deftly when he spoke to reporters a few days ago at Citi Field, conveying that he had no intention of firing staffers rashly but also that change is on the horizon if the team doesn't start playing better. If the players don't start playing better, he made perfectly clear. "There's nobody to blame," he said. "It's across the whole team."
The New York Mets finished 7-19 in the month of June, growing their NL East deficit from 3½ games to 18½, and the continued failure of the most expensive roster in baseball history has fueled a lot of macro speculation around the team's direction -- about whether the Mets will be adding or subtracting before the Aug. 1 trade deadline, about whether this will enhance Cohen's pursuit of Shohei Ohtani in the offseason.
Within the walls of Citi Field, however, there has been a lot of dissection of the micro. In recent days, the Mets' staff has been participating in what amounts to a long-scheduled midseason review. The Mets started Saturday 10 games behind in the wild-card race, and since 2012 -- when MLB went to multiple wild-card teams in each league -- no team has made the playoffs after being 10 or more games back of the final wild-card spot on July 1 or later. (It happened 10 times before that in the wild-card era, most recently in 2011.)
With Cohen beginning to draw boundaries and raising the specter of future change, the timing of the meetings could not have better -- and at the same time, it could not have been worse, through what has become a series of sleep-deprived days for a team increasingly exhausted by self-examination of on-going failures.
For now, the staff plans to fix specific problems with individual players. That is all it can do.
