Beltran’s gotta come clean ... immediately
IF THE Mets really want to keep Carlos Beltran as their manager, then they need to get him in front of a press conference immediately. Immediately, as in Wednesday. Friday at the latest. The path to salvation starts with a public accounting of what Beltran did as an Astro, what he told the Mets about what he did once the allegations surfaced and a sincere, comprehensive expression of regret for not only his actions in Houston, but also his lying to The Post’s Joel Sherman just two months ago about his involvement in these shenanigans. The Red Sox’s firing of manager Alex Cora late Tuesday night sent a second shock wave in two days through the baseball world and called into question whether the Mets, having seen first Houston and then Boston jettison their leaders in the wake of Rob Manfred’s report on the 2017 Astros’ illegal sign-stealing, would hang in there with their new manager Beltran. On Monday, shortly after Manfred announced one-year suspensions for Astros president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, Houston owner Jim Crane fired both men. Boston didn’t even bother to wait for Manfred’s ruling on Cora, the bench coach for the ’17 Astros, before cutting him loose; Major League Baseball is still investigating whether Cora’s 2018 Red Sox engaged in similar high-tech chicanery. The Mets, having stepped into this scandal not of their making — it’s so them, isn’t it? — started Tuesday intending to make Beltran available to the media, the date and site to be determined, in an attempt to put this tangential yet very tangible matter behind them. Since team brass already committed to an event Thursday in Port St. Lucie, during which they’ll rename their Florida headquarters’ address in honor of franchise icon Mike Piazza, they targeted next week, at the earliest, for such an event.
Now the urgency has increased. Now Beltran stands as the last untouched villain from this saga, his guilt detailed by Manfred as the veteran player who helped put together the scheme by which the ‘17 Astros used a center field camera and a monitor placed near the Minute Maid Park home dugout to decipher opposing catchers’ signals in real time and convey the information to batters via the pounding of a garbage can. Those Astros proceeded to win the World Series.
We know that Beltran, while in Iceland with his wife, Jessica, to celebrate their wedding anniversary, texted Sherman to deny the charges lodged against the 2017 Astros in The Athletic.
“I’m not aware of that camera,” Beltran wrote. “We were studying the opposite team every day.”
What remains uncertain is what, if anything, Beltran told the Mets after his public denials and before he met with Manfred’s investigators and sang like a canary, ironically scoring points with the MLB folks for forthrightness. Manfred’s report makes it crystal clear: Beltran was very aware of that camera, so much so that he helped set up the system, and became the only player identified by Manfred as a participant.
It would be highly embarrassing for Brodie Van Wagenen, the Mets’ beleaguered GM, to cut loose his first managerial hire now. For starters, unless the Mets can find cause to void Beltran’s contract, it would put the Mets on the hook for three managerial salaries in 2020 — Beltran, his replacement and his predecessor Mickey Callaway. Furthermore, Van Wagenen went out on a limb to choose the completely inexperienced Beltran over the highly accomplished Joe Girardi, as well as more conventional candidates such as Eduardo Perez and Derek Shelton to run this win-now Mets team. If that limb didn’t extend so long as the entirety of the offseason? Yeesh.
At the least, it’s in everyone’s best interests to watch Beltran face the music before rendering final judgment. How they got here is so very Mets. How it goes from here will determine whether this episode of “That’s So Mets!” is a comedy or a tragedy.