It’s not Sandy Alderson’s fault, says Sandy Alderson

It’s really hanging one out there to call this Mets season particularly Mets-y. Every season in Queens has an element of the weird and inexplicable to it that only the Mets can conjure. They never settle quietly into the background. But this year, well, through Jacob deGrom’s injury and Javy Baez letting it slip that he and others were basically flipping every fan the bird in secret, that would have been enough to end up in the “True Mets” Catalog.

That doesn’t include their GM turning out to be a total creep, and then his replacement getting arrested for drunk driving after attending a team function at the owner’s house. Throw in the owner lighting his own team up on Twitter after being a part of the whole GameStop thing, and even for the Mets it’s adding up.

Sandy Alderson, the president of the team, stood up in front of the media yesterday and made it clear that he didn’t have anything to do with any of this:

Well this could happen to anyone, if you take Alderson’s word on it. It’s impossible to predict that an employee is going to get loaded and then get behind the wheel, unless he’d done it before (hi there, White Sox!). Still, it kind of projects an atmosphere within the organization, at least a bit. Perhaps they didn’t find out what they needed about Jared Porter thanks to the Cubs keeping it quiet before he was hired away, but it was information that was there to be found if Alderson really wanted to. He just didn’t.

It’s pretty comedic when Alderson claims there’s nothing wrong with his hiring process, while in the very next sentence saying it deserves a good hard review. What’s most likely is that Alderson didn’t know, or didn’t care to ask, the right questions when it came to Porter. As far as Zack Scott, about the only thing Alderson could have done was make it clear that the Mets had a black eye on their reputation already and that he should be aware of that in everything he does. Maybe Alderson did, who knows, but if he did it didn’t work.

Alderson will go down as a prominent figure in baseball history, as he was the one who started the whole sabermetrics movement that his underling, Billy Beane, brought into the mainstream. This is probably not the way he envisioned going out.

But hey, this is the Mets. No one can escape.