Buck Showalter held back tears as he dropped the bomb at the end of a nearly 20-minute pregame talk with the media that that Sunday afternoon’s regular-season finale against the Philadelphia Phillies would be his final game as New York Mets manager.
The 67-year-old was honest about how things went down. Mets general manager Billy Eppler approached him in his office and told him he had two options with new president of baseball operations David Stearns entering the fray: Resign or be fired.
“I just had some things to contemplate,” Showalter said, admitting he has never spoken to Stearns. “He gave me a couple of options and the players know I would never quit or resign. I had four or five of them in my office and they said ‘We would’ve seen through that in about 30 seconds.’”
The terms of his departure are semantics at this point. It doesn’t really matter. That elusive World Series ring continues to be just that for the veteran skipper completing his 22nd season in his fourth-different decade at the helm of a ballclub. Whether he gets another shot at winning that championship obviously remains to be seen, though he already admitted that he wants to jump right back into it.
“I feel great physically,” he said.
Showalter enters the winter as the No. 19 ranked manager in MLB history with 1,726 victories having led four different franchises to the postseason — only Billy Martin and Davey Johnson have led four different teams to the playoffs.
He led the Mets to their second-best regular season ever in his first season with the team in 2022, winning 101 games and Manager of the Year honors before they ran out of gas and were bounced out of the Wild Card Series by the San Diego Padres.
With a roster built on aging arms and paper-thin depth in 2023, things went south quickly and the Mets posted their third losing season in the last four years. However, Showalter himself didn’t have much to work with as soon as a mountain of problems…
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