Laura Albanese: Mets' Andy Green was a first-rate second choice as interim manager
Mets interim manager Andy Green looks on during a game against the Boston Red Sox at Citi Field on July 11. Credit: Jim McIsaac
MILWAUKEE
A few hours before Zac Thornton went out and dominated the best team in baseball Tuesday night, interim manager Andy Green was asked what he liked about a soft-tossing lefty who earned his spot in the rotation in just three major-league starts.
“He might not light up the radar gun but . . . can pitch with angle and attack . . . and speed guys up,” he said. And then he touched on Thornton’s internal makeup.
“I love the way he’s wired, the way he competes,” Green said. “More often than not, he goes out, competes to win and expects to win and I think if you can carry that expectation to the mound for the entirety of your career, you tend to have a pretty long career.”
It was good insight, and proved prescient when Thornton exited after the sixth inning of the Mets’ 4-0 win over the Brewers at American Family Field having allowed no runs and three hits with a walk and two strikeouts over six innings, lowering his ERA to 1.93.
Granted, Green could have read all of that in a scouting report, except for the fact that Green likely oversaw the scouting report. And that’s a good indication that while the Mets might not have gotten exactly what they wanted when they tapped Green to close out the rest of this season in the manager’s chair, they may have gotten just what they needed.
When the Mets dismissed Carlos Mendoza in late June, the organization originally pivoted to Carlos Beltran — a Hall of Famer who has longstanding relationships within the current roster, and who already was serving as a special assistant to president of baseball operations David Stearns.
Beltran, who still wants to manage, and could potentially manage this team next year, declined for a host of legitimate reasons. Green, though, isn’t a consolation prize. Because while he wants to win, he provides a service that supersedes whether the Mets finish the season as the worst team in baseball, or merely the third worst: He’s the steward of this team’s future.
That doesn’t mean he was directly responsible for Thornton’s success Tuesday, Carson Benge’s two RBI night, or A.J. Ewing’s diving catch in the third. What it does mean, though, is that he “knows what makes a guy tick,” according to Christian Scott, who’s in that rookie crew along with Nolan McLean. It’s a rare opportunity, that — helping develop players and then being allowed to continue that development at the major-league level.
“It’s nice having some familiarity with the guy that’s coming in,” Scott told Newsday, adding Green would consistently check in on him when he was recovering from Tommy John surgery. “It’s a guy that I can count on and lean on for advice. I love the way he goes about it. He doesn’t like to beat around the bush. If something is going on, he tells me what’s going on and how I can get better and the ways I can improve. I love that about him.”
And that comes from knowing his young players personally. Look at that instance earlier this month, when he told reporters that Scott hadn’t pitched to his potential despite throwing five scoreless innings. Some players would react poorly to that, but he knew Scott well enough to understand that the opposite was true.
“That’s the familiarity part of it,” Scott said. “[He knows] they need at certain times — especially on the player development. Him being able to do that and having the confidence that that’s what I needed at the time was great. I loved it.”
Benge agreed.
“Being able to have [Green] over the past year since I’ve gotten drafted and gotten to know him a little bit, he’s the right man for the fill-in job,” Benge told Newsday. “He always wants more of you. He knows what everybody is capable of and he just wants to bring it out of them.”
Which brings us back to Thornton. After the win, Green again underscored his pitcher’s mettle.
“It’s strikes and it’s attack and it’s intent and those are really powerful things to have,” he said. “The reality of young pitchers in the big leagues [is] they will get hit in the mouth at some point in time. There’s an outing coming when he’s going to have to be resilient [and] respond. I think that’s what I trust in him as much as [having] a few great outings at the outset. He’s going to punch back when he gets punched.”
As if he knew what his manager had said, Thornton noted that his game was built on confidence — a confidence born when he had no Division I offers and was playing at junior college.
Those coaches, he said “gave me the utmost confidence in myself, and I kind of ran with that.”
Green knows that about this pitcher, like he knows about his other rookies, and though he downplayed his role, he acknowledged that “it’s great to be able to refer back to moments when you connected with them along the way and believed in them.
“It’s an asset. It’s not necessary. These guys are man enough to stand on their own two feet and go excel on the field, and they’ve done that prior to me arriving here.”
But they were also learning how to do that when he was back there, working in the farm system. And while they were learning about themselves, Green was learning about them, too.
When this season is over, there’s every expectation that Green will return to his old role, and none too soon — the Mets farm system has taken a step back, and there’s work to be done. A new manager will be appointed then — maybe Beltran, maybe not.
But for now, everyone is exactly where they ought to be.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
