3 NY Mets coaching staff decisions that seemed destined to fail

More often than not, coaching decisions in sports end badly. It’s rare a coach leaves on their terms positively. Coaches are hired to be fired. Plenty of members of the 2025 New York Mets coaching staff learned that the hard way last week. Few survived for the 2026 season with a couple more possibly on the way out having been given permission to talk to other teams.

Decisions to keep a coach or not need to be results driven. It doesn’t matter how well-liked a coach may be or how ingenious their thought process is. When players fail, the coaches pay the consequence.

A few Mets coaching staff decisions made by the organization over the last two years are now worth questioning as they seemed destined to fail.

1) Jeremy Barnes should have been fired after the 2023 season

Jeremy Barnes became the Mets hitting coach in 2023 when Eric Chavez was promoted to bench coach. The big failure of a season which saw the Mets sell at the trade deadline had the club reverting Chavez back to a hitting coach role while keeping Barnes onboard. Employing co-hitting coaches was unique; but so is having longer hair coming out of your nose than on top of your head. As Chavez said after getting fired, the situation was “not ideal.”

Firing Barnes after one season wouldn’t have been ideal. An unstable job for several years, the regime change should have had the team moving away from him for the betterment of the 2024 club.

2) Eric Chavez should have been the lone hitting coach in 2024 or they should’ve let him walk

Chavez was a hot coaching candidate after the 2022 season and maybe on his way to managing one day. The same way Barnes lost goodwill with the way the 2023 team performed, so did Chavez as a legitimate manager candidate.

Reverting Chavez back to a hitting coach role would have been acceptable if it wasn’t a shared gig. There was something funky about two hitting coaches. MLB coaching staffs are often loaded with staff with very specific, sometimes seemingly made up, job titles. If Chavez was going to remain, he should have been the lone voice or they should have moved on from him entirely. The Mets got caught somewhere in between.

3) Carlos Mendoza should have picked his complete coaching staff when he was hired

Most of all, the Mets should have let Carlos Mendoza have all of the say in his coaching staff. The way 2023 ended perfectly set up for massive changes. While signs were present in 2024 that maybe the coaching staff wasn’t at its best, the team’s success and deep postseason run made it so no one was getting fired.

Finding a sense of stability with the coaching and front office has been a difficult challenge for the Mets. Both during the Steve Cohen era and prior, it seems like we’ve had to see too many different managers and general managers call the shots. Although some of those changes had to do with non-baseball related incidents, it’s a mark against the franchise’s lack of consistency. Considering Mendoza is on a hotter seat heading into 2026, it’s going to set up for several of the incoming replacements to be one-and-done as well. He can’t possibly last another year if the Mets fail to make the playoffs for a second straight year.