Teixeira: Mets must fire Carlos
Did Carlos Beltran lie to just the media, or to the Mets? Does it even matter?
The Astros cheating scandal has taken down Red Sox manager Alex Cora and Astros manager A.J. Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow. Beltran is the last man standing named in MLB’s report on the Astros’ “banging scheme.”
On Wednesday, the knives starting coming out for the new Mets manager.
“They have to fire Carlos Beltran,” his former Yankee teammate Mark Teixeira said on ESPN. “There’s no way Carlos Beltran, especially in the pressure cooker of New York, there’s no way he can be the manager of the Mets. The New York papers, the Daily News and the Post, all of the tabloids, will eat up Carlos Beltran every single day until he’s fired.”
When The Athletic first named Beltran as a key player in the banging scheme, he denied it to the press. If he made the same denials to the Mets, he’s probably out of a job, because MLB’s report showed those denials were false. In fact, Cora was an incompetent cheater compared to Beltran, who helped improve on Cora’s plans for communicating signs to hitters.
Even if Beltran told Mets brass the truth, though, he might still be cooked. A clip began circulating Wednesday of Cora talking about him after the Yankees shelled Boston in London this summer. (Beltran was a special adviser for the Yankees in 2019.)
“Their biggest free-agent acquisition was Carlos Beltran,”
Cora said with an exaggerated wink. “They’re paying attention to details, and we have to clean our details … I’m not saying devices and all that stuff, there’s just stuff that the game will dictate and will scream at people. Throughout the evening, I was looking, and I saw it.”
Who cares what Beltran texted a reporter, or what he told Brodie Van Wagenen? The report on the cheating named him as one of the two principal architects of the cheating. The other cheater went out of his way to say how much he admires Beltran as a cheater. It’s hard to see how the Mets stand by their cheater when the Red Sox and Astros fired theirs.