Zack Scott speaking to reporters earlier this year. Waking up stewed in White Plains isn’t the best look for an acting GM already in a seat hot enough to pass for the electric chair.
Did you think the boo birds and the boneheads fuming over the Baez-Lindor-Pillar thumbs-down to fans would suddenly look upon that nostalgically? Wasn’t it a kick when Lindor and Jeff McNeil had a presidential-level debate over . . . whether that was a rat or a raccoon on the Citi Fields grounds?
Don’t be shocked if that’s exactly what they’re feeling, after the Mets’ acting general manager Zack Scott drove and then parked himself right into a drunk driving charge early Tuesday morning.
This is what we know: White Plains (New York) police found Scott asleep in his car near a federal court house. Scott spurned a breathalyzer but flunked a field sobriety test. Apparently, he got tanked up in the first place while attending a charity fundraiser at Mets owner Steve Cohen’s Connecticut spread not far from there.
Already I’ve seen social media slugs demanding Cohen’s head on a plate over Scott’s inebriation. Guess what. If I’m at a party at your place, the booze is flowing freely enough, and I get that bombed out of my trees, that’s on me for not knowing my limits. You didn’t hold me hostage refusing to release me until I made Jim Morrison resemble a Prohibitionist.
Scott was already on a hot seat close enough to the electric chair, when the only thing he did to fortify the injury-addled Mets at the trade deadline was to bring aboard all-but-washed-up veteran pitcher Rich Hill and the slick-fielding but too-free-swinging Baez. (Where was Cohen—who called out the Mets’ undisciplined hitting, albeit kindly and gently—when Scott made the Baez deal?)
“But the Braves quietly got much better at the deadline,” writes Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post. The Phillies upgraded. So, of course, did the Giants and Dodgers and, let us not forget, the Yankees. Maybe [Mets [resident] Sandy Alderson can shoulder some of the blame; Alderson, an old target of Met-fan angst, probably deserves as much.”
Scott also threw his wounded under the proverbial bus, saying it was pretty much their fault for getting hurt and not getting with whatever the Mets’ health program is. He was blissfully unaware that such a call-out meant his own administration looks like a group of nincompoops playing Operation and pronouncing themselves credentialed medical experts.
Which one of them kept getting buzzed removing the funny bone?
Most likely, Scott would have been gone after the season ends. He might have been moved into a benign advisory role before his rude awakening in White Plains. Now the Mets can’t afford even to put him in charge of a Citi Field cleaning crew.
Alderson still has some splainin’ to do, though, about why he was so hot to pursue the known misogynist Trevor Bauer so hard last winter. The most narrow escape of Alderson’s career was losing out to the Dodgers on Bauer—who turned out to be too much more than a mere misogynist, as he now awaits whether a district attorney will file sexual assault charges against him and he won’t likely pitch again in 2021 . . . or beyond.
The Mets under .500 and five and a half games back in both the National League East and the National League wild card chase—that’s what a 9-19 August did to them in an eleven-game free-fall out of the NL East leadership—may actually be their smallest problem. The toxicity in the organisation needs to be cleaned out.
Waking up stewed in front of the federal court in White Plains is entirely on Scott. But so are a few other things that indicate it’s time for Cohen—who’s had, mostly, the patience of Job in his first year owning the Mets—to flip the switch on the Hoover and clean the Mets’ house. Beat, sweep, and clean it out.
It begins with Alderson, alas. For all his distinguished baseball service past, including a term in the commissioner’s office, the Mets’ president has earned impeachment and removal. The articles against him only begin with that fan-their-behinds statement about the thumbs-downers that he probably carried in his pocket for a couple of weeks before the idiot brigades going cray-cray last Sunday gave him his excuse.
They continue with having hired and elevated Scott in the first place—after former Mets GM Jared Porter had to be purged over his hot-pursuit unwanted sexting aimed at a Cubs employee when Porter ran that team’s scouting apparatus. At that time, it looked as though the Mets were caught with their proverbial pants down, but now it looks as though Alderson’s facility for due diligence abandoned him long enough ago.
Because Alderson is also the Mets’ chieftain who hired Mickey Callaway to manage them, then endured two seasons in which Callaway was in deeper over his own head than a submarine beneath the ocean surface. And that proved the least of Callaway’s issues.
Alderson learned the hard way—when the Angels first suspended, then fired him as their subsequent pitching coach, and baseball government banned him through the end of 2022—that Callaway had a too-pronounced penchant for texting, sexting, sharing shirtless images, and pushing for hot dates with unwilling media women, one of whom called his predatory style baseball’s worst-kept secret.
“What exactly is the Mets’ definition of due diligence when pursuing players and executives?” asks The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal with appropriate snark. “Seeing whether they can spell their names correctly?”
How the hell did Alderson—who built three straight pennant winners and one world champion in Oakland, then called the old umpires union’s chief Richie Phillips’s bluff and accepted mass umpire resignations after the umps balked over one MLB attempt to mandate umpire accountability—devolve to this?
And what the hell was Scott not thinking, considering, as Rosenthal writes, that after “the Callaway and Porter fiascos, he needed to conduct himself impeccably.”
For this toxic cleanup, Cohen’s going to need the Hoover, the Roto-Rooter, truckloads of Raid, and a hazmat team.
Throneberry Fields Forever 