Billy Eppler’s belief remains.
In the club he assembled, in the manager he selected, the coaching staff in the dugout and in the ambitious plan to be a consistent World Series threat.
In the midst of a gut-punch of a first half for the Mets, the club’s general manager spoke for 21 minutes in which he expressed confidence that the fourth-place Mets will bounce back.
As will their manager and his staff.
“They deserve an opportunity to keep this going and all of the support we can give them,” Eppler said of Buck Showalter and the coaches.
Showalter’s seat has gotten hot through a 35-43 start that the Mets took into Tuesday’s game at Citi Field against the Brewers.
But Eppler signaled there are no wholesale changes coming soon.
“Buck’s had a good amount of adversity heaped his way,” Eppler said of the second-year Mets manager. “It started in spring training with the loss of [Edwin] Diaz and losing some of the pitchers for a time being. Justin [Verlander] being out at the start of the year, Max [Scherzer], his suspension and the irregular workload.
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“Buck’s handled that adversity, and he’s the guy to get us back on track.”
The players in the dugout and bullpen, too, Eppler believes, will get back on track.
The Mets’ rotation ranked as the third-least valuable entering Tuesday, according to FanGraphs’ WAR rankings.
Their bullpen was the second-worst in baseball.
Eppler pointed at both the pitching staff as a whole and “on-field execution and converting balls into outs, baserunning and things like that” as the biggest sources of the Mets’ struggles.
“We’re in a position where we’re changing some things up and moving a couple of pieces around,” Eppler said. “I know [pitching coach Jeremy Hefner] and some of our analytics group are working on pitch design and trying to get these guys in a better spot.
“That’s where our mind is right now.”
