Why Did the New York Mets Hire an 82-Year-Old to be Their Coach?
The New York Mets fired pitching coach Dave Eiland but replaced him with Phil Regan… and 82-year-old. Why?
On Thursday, the New York Mets fired pitching coach Dave Eiland and Bullpen Coach Chuck Hernandez. The club also added the position of Pitching Strategist, and Jeremy Accardo will be filling that role.
The team was struggling mightily on the pitching side of things, as they had a combined ERA of 4.67.
The team named Phil Regan the interim pitching coach…. and he is 82 years old.
Why did the Mets want to make this move?
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“By adding all three of these gentlemen to the staff, we feel like we have created a very good blend of experience, a very good blend of teachers, of people that are capable of processing information,” GM Brodie Van Wagenen said. “Most importantly, people that can work collaboratively along with the existing coaching staff to put the players in the best position they can to succeed.”
Regan has held the position of Mets minor league assistant pitching coordinator since 2016 after spending 7 years as the pitching coach for St. Lucie of the Florida State League. He was a major-league pitcher from for more than a decade.
He was most notably a teammate of Sandy Koufax when he was with the Dodgers. He also faced Ted Williams on August 6 of 1960.
So, the New York Mets will have a guy donning their orange and blue who was playing with two of the best players who ever played the game.
Now former pitching coach Dave Eiland was, of course, the pitching coach of Jacob deGrom last season when he won the Cy Young award. It was his first season with the team.
After Eiland was canned, deGrom was stunned by the decision.
“I was kind of shocked,” deGrom said. “The goal here is to win baseball games, we haven’t done that. Seems that someone always takes the blame for something like that.”
According to Matt Ehalt of Yahoo Sports, “there were perceived issues when it came to collaboration and how analytics were incorporated into the pitching.”
The Mets don’t have much patience when it comes to the coaching staff around manager Mickey Callaway as this marked the 6th firing or reassignment since Callaway was brought in from Cleveland.
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I don’t see why they had to make this move now, especially when they are substituting Eiland for an 82-year-old who has been in the minor leagues for a while so he probably has not communicated with a lot of the big league pitchers at all or since those players were in the minors.