First, it was irrelevant. Then, it was corny and embarrassing. Finally, not by their doing, it was in defiance of incompetent and oppressive management.
That’s a heavy load for a couple thumbs to carry, but the Mets are more melodrama than baseball team, as usual. They were off Monday and players didn’t speak to the media then as a result. Presumably they had the team meeting that Sandy Alderson threatened them with after calling the players’ thumbs-down gesture “totally unacceptable” and “unprofessional in its meaning.” Unnecessarily making a huge mess worse isn’t strictly confined to the Wilpons, as it turns out.
Mets players have been doing the thumbs-down f-you to their own fans since at least August 6, as one Twitter personality pointed out. (Hilariously, they were doing it in Philadelphia then, calling into question Javier Baez’s explanation that they were booing back at New York fans. Even more hilariously, that was just Baez’s seventh game with the Mets after getting traded; he had only played two home games to that point, destroying Bobby Bonilla’s speedrun record for coming to Queens and hating it.)
When the players were finally asked about it on Sunday, Baez gave an answer that teetered between lame and nonsensical. “When we don’t get success, we’re going to get booed,” he said. “So they’re going to get booed when we get success…It just feels bad when I strike out and I get booed. I want to let them know that when we have success, we’re going to do the same thing to let them know how it feels.” Baez also went out of his way, bizarrely, to twice say that “The boos don’t bother me.”
That’s weak, just like former manager and current unemployed creep Mickey Callaway threatening to knock out a member of the media in 2019. But these things are messy. The media member who Callaway and pitcher Jason Vargas went after — widely perceived as an innocent good guy at the time — wrote a story about Marcus Stroman this month that all but called the pitcher a flashy, me-first, hip-hop style athlete. Stroman, for his part, is both the subject of vicious racism from the media and incredibly sensitive about totally normal baseball coverage. Players complaining about their treatment by fans and media is a little easier to understand when you remember that that treatment isn’t all booing about whiffing on the slider, even if the complaints are silly and explicitly about booing.
Mets brass could have left it there, publicly. Baez and Kevin Pillar, two of the players who did the thumbs-down, will probably be gone after the season. (Both were questionable acquisitions by Alderson’s front office, which deserves plenty of blame and scrutiny for the team’s on-field collapse.) A third, Francisco Lindor, is only the franchise cornerstone and undisputed clubhouse leader; his ten-year, $341 million extension hasn’t even kicked in yet. But the stench of toxicity and incompetence that was supposedly aired out of the room when the Wilpons sold the team hasn’t quite cleared yet. The front office has been engulfed in persistent sexual harassment scandals since Steve Cohen bought the team, a familiar story at Cohen-owned businesses. Last month, acting general manager Zack Scott, attempting to blame the players for their nonstop injuries, essentially admitted that the Mets’ performance staff couldn’t get the players to follow along with its plans to keep them healthy. So maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising when, hours after Baez aired his frustrations, team president Sandy Alderson put out a starchy statement defending the purported honor of Mets fans.
“Mets fans are understandably frustrated over the team’s recent performance,” he said. “The players and the organization are equally frustrated, but fans at Citi Field have every right to express their own disappointment. Booing is every fan’s right.”
It’s worth very quickly noting here that while Alderson vigorously threw his players under the bus, when his front office was reported to be a den of sexual harassment, his response was: “People are getting executed, including women, by the way, for reasons that are unjustifiable….Is there ever a statute of limitations on coverage of some of this stuff?”
More to the point, Alderson made it clear that he doesn’t have his players’ backs, and when they communicate frustration in a way that he doesn’t like, his modeling of good communication is a rapidly dashed-off Medium post telling them to shut up. Who would choose to work for this man? Or given that many baseball players don’t get to choose their workplace, who could possibly enjoy it?
“Mets fans are loyal, passionate, knowledgeable and more than willing to express themselves,” Alderson said. “We love them for every one of these qualities.” Having chosen to root for the Mets, you can’t quite say that their loyalty and passion is born out of knowledge. Mets fans express themselves with self-loathing; it is truly incredible that the players may hate the fans more than the fans hate themselves. Even more incredible: As the Mets’ players and fanbase completely implode, Sandy Alderson managed to outdo them all.
