The National League Division Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves begins Saturday at Truist Park.
Three teams from the National League East, the Phillies, Braves and Miami Marlins, made the postseason. The New York Mets, who ran the highest payroll in baseball history, was not one of them.
The Mets will be watching from home as they deal with their own drama in Queens.
Billy Eppler resigned from his position as Mets general manager on Thursday. In a statement released by the team, Eppler said he wanted new president of baseball operations David Stearns to have a “clean slate.”
It was later reported by the New York Post that Eppler resigned due to a league investigation on the team’s improper usage of the injured list.
While finding Eppler’s replacement probably isn’t a priority of Stearns — the Mets need to find a new manager to replace Buck Showalter — he could pluck a new GM from his former team.
Former Phillies GM Matt Klentak’s name was “floated around” as a possible candidate for the job, according to Mets beat writer Anthony DiComo of MLB.com on an MLB Network appearance.
“One name that was floated to me was Matt Klentak, the former Phillies GM, who has been working for the Brewers, so there is a Stearns connection there,” DiComo said.
Klentak stepped down as Phillies GM in October 2020 and reassigned to a position in business operations. He was hired as a special assistant in Stearns’ front office in Milwaukee in late January 2022. He oversaw the Brewers’ international scouting department that year and took on more responsibility with the major league club after Stearns announced he was stepping down from the president of baseball operations position in October 2022.
Klentak reflected on his time with the Phillies in a chat with SABR in May.
“It ended up, it appears anyway, that it worked,” Klentak said. “It was all worth it. They’re hanging a National League pennant flag up there right now in part, and I’m certainly not going to take all the credit for it, but at least in part because of some of the things we did while I was there. And it just didn’t happen fast enough. And I hate to use that as a cop out, but sometimes, that’s what happens. These are baseball players and as much as we make projections and we have plans and we think it’s going to go a certain way, sometimes it doesn’t work that way.”
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