Luis Rojas Had To Go
Rojas was a good manager. I don't have a negative thought about him. He still had to lose his job.
Luis Rojas had a tough job from the moment he took it. He was the replacement, the manager who filled an emergency void. Questions about Carlos Beltrán followed him everywhere he went. And yet, he managed.
Literally and figuratively. Rojas managed the Mets, and he managed them pretty well. He dealt with bad rosters, injuries, underperformance, and coaching turnover (who can tell how much the various issues were related), and through it all, he had his players’ backs, and his players had his. He was universally respected by players, officials, and reporters. Luis Rojas did nothing wrong.
But the Mets still had to let him go.
To be clear, this isn’t an indictment of Rojas. I don’t have a negative thought about him. All the criticisms of Rojas — he uses relievers too often, he somehow doesn’t use those same relievers enough, he doesn’t pinch-hit when he should, he uses pinch-hitters too much, etc. — seem mostly like flailings of a Mets fanbase that needs someone to blame for the Mets’ problems. Rojas might not have been a lightning-quick tactician like Bobby Valentine (although even if he had been, we might never have known it, given that on-field decisions seem to come mostly from front offices these days), but he knew baseball, supported his players while often pushing the right buttons, and took responsibility for problems under his watch. I hope he agrees to remain with the organization in some capacity, as the Mets have reportedly offered.
No, the reason Rojas had to lose his job had nothing to do with Rojas. It has everything to do with someone else. We don’t know who that someone is yet, but after today’s news, we’re one step closer to finding out.
By all indications, the Mets plan to hire a high-powered President of Baseball Operations. Someone like Theo Epstein, Billy Beane, or David Stearns; someone with name recognition and star power far beyond your average executive; someone who wants to spend several hundred million dollars of Steve Cohen’s money, no questions asked, to win a championship.
Whoever the Mets end up hiring, 2022 will be the start of a new era in Queens, and that start needs to be a fresh one. The Mets will bring in a new chief executive. That executive should assemble his own brand-new administration. That group should hire a new manager (and coaches, if necessary), evaluate each player and decide what to do with them, and get to work building the Mets into a powerhouse. Frankly, it shouldn’t be that difficult. The roster is most of the way there already.
Luis Rojas can’t hang around with these new Mets as manager for two related reasons. First, Steve Cohen and Sandy Alderson shouldn’t impose any limitations or conditions on their new hire. They can’t stick their new POBO with a manager he didn’t choose; what if Billy Beane will only join the Mets if he’s allowed to hire his own skipper? Every candidate the Mets interview should be attracted by the opportunity to shape the organization from the ground up, an opportunity that only exists now that Rojas hasn’t been retained.
That leads into the second reason the Mets need a new manager: they’ve seen the problems with incomplete coach/front office turnover all too recently. This very season, in fact. New ownership came in, but didn’t bring a new coaching staff with it, so the coaches hovered in a strange state all year, knowing full well that they weren’t quite what the new administration wanted. Questions lingered all season: Chili Davis was fired, and Rojas’ job security hung over everything the Mets did.
A new manager will bring stability and confidence to the 2022 Mets. If the Mets hire a vaunted executive, and that person in turn brings in a manager on a multi-year deal who has the new Front Office’s full support, job security will become a non-issue. Had Rojas kept the job, it would have been the first question of every press conference after a loss.
I don’t know who the Mets’ next manager should be. Frankly, I’m not sure how important managers are anymore. That’s part of the reason I’m okay with losing a manager I like: Rojas was good, but so are a lot of other managers. But I do know one thing: The 2022 Mets can’t afford distractions. They’re going to be a high-powered team with high expectations, a new Front Office, and several new players, and their focus can’t be anywhere but winning ballgames. In the end, the reason Luis Rojas had to lose his job wasn’t anything that happened on the field. It was the fact that he got his job from Brodie Van Wagenen and the Wilpons. Connie Mack himself couldn’t manage his way out of that one.