Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports
Banging may lead to Bam Bam’s big break.
The Mets and Carlos Beltran “agreed to mutually part ways,” the team said in a statement Thursday, relieving their manager of his duties less than three months after hiring him and leaving bench coach Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens as an option to get his first crack at managing in the majors.
Beltran was implicated in the high-tech cheating scandal that’s enveloping baseball and named as a ringleader in its report, though MLB decided it would not mete out punishment to players. Instead it has focus on the heads who enabled rather than shut the operations down: Houston manager A.J. Hinch, GM Jeff Luhnow and Boston manager Alex Cora. The dismissal of Beltran — who was part of Houston’s system in which it used TV cameras to steal catcher signals and then would alert the hitter, sometimes by banging, what pitch was coming — raises the manager carnage to three.
This leaves the Astros, Red Sox and now Mets without leaders less than a month before spring training, and Meulens would be an easy fallback option in New York and perhaps even in Boston. For years the well-regarded coach has been a presumed future manager, working under Bruce Bochy since 2010 including most recently as his bench coach. Yet the opportunity has not come, and though Meulens interviewed with San Francisco this offseason, he was passed over and eventually took the job as Beltran’s right-hand man.
The 52-year-old will have competition. Eduardo Perez, the ESPN analyst, was believed to be the runner-up for the gig that went to Beltran. The Mets also could promote from within and like quality control coach Luis Rojas, who managed young stars like Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil in the minors.