Just yesterday, we learned that New York Mets general manager Billy Eppler was resigning from his position.
With David Stearns joining the team, he didn’t want to have anyone in over his head. We can understand that, but as my colleague Charles-Alexis says so well, he just had to be good.
Speaking of being bad, and as one story never comes alone among the hapless Mets, major league baseball is investigating the former general manager over allegations of inappropriate use of the injured list during the 2023 season .
Is that why he left?
Hiding healthy players on the injured list can help a competitive team (don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Mets aren’t competitive), because it can allow the club to keep its players under team control rather than risk losing them to other organizations.
This situation at the Mets joins a long list of executives who have left New York under special circumstances, even though the fact that before team president Sandy Alderson stepped down and becomes special advisor at the start of the 2023 season, the latter had said that the verification process was deeper than in the past due to errors already made.
Indeed, Eppler’s two predecessors, Jared Porter and Zack Scott, were both fired for off-field issues.
In January 2021, Porter sexually harassed a female reporter while working for the Chicago Cubs. For his part, Scott took over on an interim basis until September 2021, when he was arrested for drunk driving.
But that’s not all. Before Porter and Scott, Mickey Callaway, the Mets manager from 2018 to 2019, was suspended and placed on MLB’s ineligibility list for sending inappropriate messages and photos to female journalists.
Nothing new under the New York sun.
