General manager Brody Van Wagner and his next office are leaving the New York Mets, the team announced Friday.
The move was announced less than an hour after hedge fund manager Steve Cohen completed his team’s 2.4 billion purchase.
Special Assistant to General Manager Omar Minaya, Assistant General Managers Allard Baird and Adam Guttierez and Jared Banner, Executive Director of Player Development, are also leaving. The position of senior vice president and senior strategy officer John Rico is not mentioned.
Cohen ended control of the Wilpon family franchise after 34 mostly disappointing years and took over as chief executive of Fischer. In the first step, he appointed Sandy Alderson, former general manager of the Mets, as team president and ended Jeff Wilpon’s tenure as chief operating officer.
Alderson, not Cohen, announced the departure of the baseball staff and said he had begun the process of creating a leadership staff.
“I thank Brody, Allard, Adam and Jared for their contributions over the past two years,” he said in a statement. “I especially want to thank Omar for his long and distinguished service to the Mets in many important capacities.”
Van Wagner was a player agent and co-head of CAA baseball before Winpin hired him to replace Alderson after the 2018 season. The Mets went 86-76, finishing third in the NL East, and Van Wagner was sacked by manager Mickey Callaway and replaced by Carlos Beltran.
But when Belttrain was implicated as a player in January 2017 by Commissioner Rob Manfred in the Houston Astros sign-theft scandal as a player in Beltran’s final season in 2017, he lost his job without managing a game and was replaced by quality control coach Louis Rojas.
New York went 26-34 and missed extended playoffs in the short 2020 season.
Friday’s move makes Rojas’ future uncertain. Fired Astros GM Jeff Luhnu, who completed a season-long suspension last week, could be a candidate for analytics-oriented Cohen.
Many of Van Wagner’s moves failed, including acquiring second baseman Robinson Cano and signing free agents T signing de Frazier and Jade Lowry. All three were among his former clients.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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