This was shaping up as a standard-issue hellish day for the Mets. Two injuries to key players. The completion of being swept at home. The continued spiral toward irrelevance.
It all felt familiar to a franchise that majors in tortured history.
But then Jorge Lopez decided to have a firecracker, bleach moment, where he morphed from bad pitching to worse on-field behavior to a bizarre postgame scrum with reporters in which he offered several curses and no remorse for behavior that manager Carlos Mendoza had no qualms about describing as unprofessional and none of his teammates did much to defend.
It ended up costing Lopez his job.
Look, the Mets have been bad for one third of a season. More and more it looks as if they are just bad. But they still have to stand for a way they are going to play and behave. And, thus, they acted properly in designating Lopez for assignment after the game and after — among other items — he told reporters he had not met with David Stearns and Mendoza, when he had.
Mendoza is a first-year manager and while he has handled himself well and forged strong relationships with his bosses, clubhouse and reporters, his team has played sloppily. At some point that reflects on the manager. And, for sure, unprofessional behavior by players does as well. This is a moment when Mendoza needed his bosses’ support because it was so clear how perturbed he was by what Lopez had done, so clear that he felt this is the kind of behavior that cannot be accepted without raising consideration that the manager has lost control.
We would all like to live in a world in which every person is handled the same way. But players with sterling reps and/or big salaries can survive what a middling middle reliever making $2 million with a history of being highly emotional just can’t.
So this will go down in the ever-increasing problematic annals of the Mets as a day they lost Edwin Diaz, Pete Alonso, yet another 2024 game and their decorum. Can they gain anything by backing their manager and for Francisco Lindor calling a players’ only postgame meeting in which many spoke and implored each other to find good process, good attitudes and the ability to hold each other to high standards to rise from the NL’s third-worst record (22-33).
“It was the right time for us to, as a group, collectively sit down and look at each other and hold each other accountable,” Lindor said.
Lindor said Lopez’s actions did not lead to the meeting. Multiple players involved said the subject did not come up. Most probably knew by then that Lopez was in their clubhouse for the final time and that his behavior did not produce the 10-3 loss that completed a three-game Dodger sweep nor would he have any future impact on improving results on or off the field.
Adam Ottavino said the meeting “was needed to open the floor to everybody and a bunch of people talked that usually don’t talk and a lot of wisdom came out of the things people said. And ultimately, you know, we have 110 games [actually 107] to play. And we got to play them to the best of our ability.”
In the short term that will be without Diaz, who was placed on the IL with a shoulder impingement. The slumping reliever insisted that this was purely about injury, not a mental reset. But he also said he is not getting an MRI and expects to be back in 15 days.
Alonso was hit in his right hand by a James Paxton fastball in the first inning and was removed. The Mets said an X-ray was negative, but that the first basemen went for further testing.
The Mets, who had scored two runs in the first 22 innings of the series, generated three in the fifth Wednesday to tie the score. But the one quality area over the first quarter of the season, their setup core, has collapsed the last two weeks due to heavy usage fueled by short starts, close games and the implosion of Diaz.
Ottavino and Lopez combined to allow six eighth-inning runs. Lopez then got into his spat with third-base umpire Ramon DeJesus over a check swing that clearly was not a swing and was ousted — his final pitch as a Met being his glove into the stands. After the game, there was some uncertainty in his second language whether Lopez said he was with the “worst team” in MLB or was the “worst teammate.” Given a chance to clarify, he said “team.” I am still not sure he understood, but perhaps most informative about what was actually going down was three Mets media relations officials, including their Spanish translator, ringed the interview without stepping in. By then, it was clear internally that Lopez was an ex-Met going through his final acts in this clubhouse.
The Mets needed to do that to support their first-year manager. The players needed to meet because that is what is done at low moments. But what is most vital for the Mets is to play better — which like Lopez’s hold on a roster spot might already be gone.
