Sandy Alderson
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Sandy Alderson, not New York City, is why the New York Mets can’t find a willing GM.

I’m not a New York Mets fan by any stretch but thanks to team president Sandy Alderson, ESNY’s resident obnoxious New York Yankees guy is now weighing in.

The Mets have a lot of problems, but the demanding New York market is not one of them.

Sorry, let me explain. Per an AP report, Alderson spoke at the GM meetings on Tuesday and discussed his team’s struggles to find a permanent general manager. He claimed neither he nor owner Steve Cohen was the reason why the Mets couldn’t make a permanent hire.

Rather, he blamed New York outright.

“I think it’s mostly about New York, and not about, you know, Steve or the organization or what have you,” Alderson said. “It’s a big stage and some people would just prefer to be elsewhere.”

Um, excuse me? Sandy, do you ever listen to yourself before you speak, or have you advanced to the no-filter stage of being 73 years old? Don’t get me wrong, we New Yorkers are blunt to a fault and we appreciate that quality in others. But this? This is low even for the New York Mets.

The problem isn’t New York, Sandy Alderson. It’s you, and you alone.

New York is why people love the Mets

First of all, everyone wants to come to New York. It’s the greatest city in the world for a reason. We’ve got the best pizza, Broadway shows, and plenty to keep everyone occupied from museums to shopping to parks.

Not only that, but look at the $341 million extension Francisco Lindor signed last season. He could have hit free agency and, despite having an off year, probably signed a similar deal with either the Mets or another team. The point is, however, he stayed in New York. He liked what the Mets were putting together and felt confident enough to make that long of a commitment.

Unless your name is Shohei Ohtani and you explicitly specify New York isn’t on the table, the Big Apple is always in the conversation. Mets, Yankees, Hudson Valley Renegades, it doesn’t matter. The city is and always has been a draw.

That is, it has been for everyone except the New York Mets, as of late. And you can point the finger at Sandy Alderson.

 

Sandy Alderson is the New York Mets’ kryptonite

Let’s be honest. Rebuilding and getting the Mets to the 2015 World Series aside, the bad is starting to outweigh the good during his two tenures in Queens. Let’s recap the greatest hits:

  • Hired Mickey Callaway as manager in October 2017. Callaway’s tenure was rife with poor performance and altercations between players and media. Callaway was fired after two seasons and later found to have sexually harassed multiple women over several years, including when he was with the Mets.

 

  • Hired Jared Porter as GM in December 2020, not long after Cohen bought the team. One month later, Porter resigned after reports that he sent explicit texts to a female journalist.

 

  • Porter’s successor, Zack Scott, was arrested for DWI in September and fired two months later.

And how did Sandy Alderson deal with all of this? He simply lamented that the team didn’t vet job candidates as well as they could have.

People don’t want to come work for the New York Mets because they’re intimidated by the city. They’re avoiding jobs with the team because Sandy Alderson has become a literal disaster.

 

Sandy Alderson needs to step aside

Look at it this way. Even though the New York Mets are on the hunt for a GM, they’re pretty cloak and dagger about what Alderson’s duties as team president are. Not to mention, Alderson’s son Bryn is an assistant GM. Is this a serious baseball job, or one at a family business where one is really an executive in name only?

Yes, Steve Cohen considers Alderson a friend and probably wants to keep him around for as long as he’s able. But some of the top names in the game have turned down coming to New York. Not even Billy Beane could be convinced to leave the Oakland A’s, nor could former Cubs or Red Sox architect Theo Epstein. Earlier this afternoon, Joel Sherman of The New York Post reported former Washington Nationals assistant GM Adam Cromie had “a real shot” at the job.

Here’s the problem. Cromie hasn’t worked in baseball since 2014 and has practiced law for the last seven years. Congratulations, New York Mets. You’re now scraping the literal bottom of the barrel.

But hey, it’s not Sandy Alderson’s fault, right? Clearly, New York is too big and intimidating a city. Who wants a shot at poking the evil crosstown rival New York Yankees in the eye multiple times, maybe even making them an afterthought? The pressure is just too high!

Any real New Yorker knows that’s a load of crap. Our great city isn’t the problem. Sandy Alderson is.

And if Steve Cohen got off Twitter for maybe 30 seconds, he’d actually pay attention to his investment as such and not just a shiny new toy.

Josh Benjamin has been a staff writer at ESNY since 2018. He has had opinions about everything, especially the Yankees and Knicks. He co-hosts the “Bleacher Creatures” podcast and is always looking for new pieces of sports history to uncover, usually with a Yankee Tavern chicken parm sub in hand.