Future hall of fame manager Bruce Bochy dishes out high praise for New York Mets skipper Luis Rojas.
Newly-hired New York Mets manager Luis Rojas already has a big fan in the fraternity of MLB managers.
Retired three-time champion skipper Bruce Bochy praised the Mets’ new manager, via Kevin Kernan of the New York Post.
Bochy, who’s entering the first year of his retirement after 13 seasons in San Francisco with the Giants, is close friends with Rojas’s father, Felipe Alou, and has known the new Mets skipper for several years.
“I’ve gotten to know Luis through Felipe, and you can just see his passion for the game, he’s got a great way about him,” Bochy told the Post. “He’s smart. He’s done a lot of things in baseball. He speaks well and I think he is going to be able to communicate with anybody, and that is a special Alou quality. He gets that from his dad.”
Alou, Rojas’s father, spent 10 seasons (1992-2001) as the Montreal Expos manager winning National League Manager of the Year honors in 1994. He then managed the San Francisco Giants from 2003-2006 before being replaced by Bochy in 2007.
On his relationship with Alou, Bochy told the Post, “When I was a young manager, he was one that I would seek out when we played Montreal. We have a history. So I was comfortable going up to him as a young manager and asking questions. He just had a way of putting things in perspective as well as anybody — the game and the people.”
As Bochy pointed out, Rojas has as good a mentor as anyone in the majors with his father a long-time skipper at both the minor and major league levels.
Rojas will hope to do something his father did just once in his managerial career: lead his team to the postseason.
