It took Lily Tomlin’s character Debbie Fiderer two tries to win the favor of President Bartlet when she interviewed for the executive secretary position on The West Wing, though there was a good excuse for missing on the first try (“I was high”) and, honestly, Fiderer wasn’t really about winning anybody’s favor.
“All right,” Martin Sheen as Bartlet said, exasperated as their second meeting seemed to go as badly as the first. “I think the interview’s over.”
“Yeah,” Tomlin as Fiderer agreed sardonically. “But let’s do this every once in a while.”
Debbie gets the job in the end, as the viewer knew she would, because — c’mon, you’re gonna bring Lily Tomlin on the show twice merely for fleeting comic relief? And somebody got the job as Mets general manager after it seemed nobody would because, c’mon, somebody had to.
The Mets made the hiring of Billy Eppler [1] official Thursday night and set him up with his ritual Zoom presser [2] Friday afternoon. The ritual isn’t Eppler’s personally, but it is what everybody the Mets install for a prominent role in the offseason submits to. I know this because the Mets install a lot of new people for prominent roles in the offseason. This offseason. Last offseason. The one before it. The one before that. We indeed do this once in a while.
This franchise hasn’t bridged the gap between seasons without at least one dog/pony show of a New Sheriff In Town nature since the winter of 2016-17. Making their media debuts live or virtually to varying degrees of fanfare since the relative period of stability that reigned during the Sandy Alderson/Terry Collins epoch have been Mickey Callaway, Brodie Van Wagenen, Carlos Beltran, Luis Rojas, Steve Cohen (he bought his way in), Alderson 2.0, Jared Porter and now Eppler. I don’t think Zack Scott got an introductory Zoom, settling instead for a vote of confidence in a prepared statement, befitting his “acting” designation. A manager to be named later will fairly soon sit in his parlor or maybe in front of the wall of dancing logos at Citi Field and keep the introductions coming.
That’s a lot of getting to know people from scratch or, in Alderson’s case, with a fresh perspective. Sooner or later, the tidbits and nuances that seem telling at first blend into a blur. Whose priority was making the players feel loved? Who pledged to build a new culture? Who forecast a world championship in three to five years? Some of them? All of them? Presented in the best light possible when they couldn’t have been more enthused to take on their challenge, they seemed like excellent individuals well-suited for running whichever portion of the Mets was supposed to be their bailiwick and we, therefore, were set to benefit.
Most of those named above are no longer with us in the Metsian sense. Nobody who isn’t here left in a blaze of glory.
Eppler is among us for now, though, and that’s swell, I suppose. With Cohen and Alderson hovering in the adjacent, larger Zoom window, he seemed quite happy to have signed a four-year contract and was sincerely glad to tell every reporter over Zoom that it was good to see them and that they’d each asked a great question. He complimented the passion of Mets fans, which was worth one brownie point, and tied it to experiencing our “rabid” ways first-hand when he sat at Shea Stadium in 2005, which was worth another. He preached the importance of depth for a franchise that deployed 64 players in 2021. He mentioned something about hitters needing to make better “swing decisions,” which sounds an awful lot like knowing when to swing, except in jargon. Also, “probabilistic” is apparently the new “analytic,” which replaced “advanced metric” a few years ago, which itself replaced “sabermetric” in baseballspeak.
I don’t want to be too cynical about what the former Angels GM brings to the Mets, but I also don’t want to read too much into Day One. After so many of these fellows have zoomed into and out of our immediate consciousness, it doesn’t seem worth getting attached let alone excited. If I’m overcorrecting to the point of blasé, I’ll happily recant when the champagne is flowing in two to four years and swear I saw something special there all along, I’m an Eppler, we’re an Eppler, wouldn’t you like to be an Eppler, too?
Good luck, Billy. Good luck to all of us.