Mets Are Scapegoating Coaches After Hitting Failures

They’re doing it again. 

The New York Mets scapegoated their entire coaching staff after they collapsed during the second half of last season, and this year they’ve knocked down the number to three as they fired director of hitting Jeff Albert, quality assurance coach Danny Barnes and batting practice pitcher Kevin Mahoney. The other coaches will all be retained, at least for the moment, although they should all consider themselves on notice considering how erratically the Mets operate. 

Is this improvement? Let’s take a look. 

The coaching purge that happened after the 2025 season played a key role in the second collapse that happened in the first half of this season. The Mets left manager Carlos Mendoza standing, which quickly proved to be an untenable position that resulted in Mendoza getting fired, although it took far too long for the Mets to do this. 

This time around the scapegoating is more specific. The Mets pitched fairly well for the most part and their young pitchers emerged as a possible force for the future, so they’re focusing on the hitting coaches this time around.

Will it work? Not likely. Here’s why. 

If you go back to the end of 2025, it was former Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez who spoke out about this. He shared the job with another fired coach who handled the analytics part of the hitting equation, and when Chavez got the gate he offered some thoughts about having one voice to provide clear communication. 

What the Mets are doing again is the opposite of that. Turnover like this equals lack of continuity and the absence of a clear direction, and the Mets are sort of betting that the failure won’t be as bad this time around. 

If you’re looking for a recent example of how this sort of thing works, consider former Mets starter Freddy Peralta on the pitching side. Peralta’s struggles also contributed heavily to this year’s failure, and the Mets offered a variety of “suggestions,” including throwing his changeup and focusing on throwing his fastball in the upper part of the strike zone. 

Those suggestions didn’t take, to say the least, but the Tampa Bay Rays had a simpler solution when they acquired Peralta in a trade deadline deal. Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder noticed that Peralta moved faster on the mound when he wasn’t pitching out of his windup, so they presented that as the first step in a possible fix. 

The fix worked, and Peralta is now pitching in the playoffs, which is something the Mets can only dream about having their remaining pitchers do at the moment.