Todd Zeile BLASTS Mets Front Office After Carlos Mendoza Fired

**Craig Carton** (0:00)
From SNY, here's our pal Todd Zeile.
The last time I saw Todd Zeile, he and I were dancing to a former... He's laughing. He knows what it was. Sammy Hagar was playing in a friend's backyard for a birthday party, and there's me and Todd Zeile dancing to Sammy Hagar.

**Todd Zeile** (0:20)
How you been, buddy? That's absolutely true. I can't drive 55, but Sammy got us rolling.

**Craig Carton** (0:28)
Yeah, I remember.

**Todd Zeile** (0:29)
How you been?

**Craig Carton** (0:29)
You good?

**Todd Zeile** (0:32)
I'm doing OK, man. I wish it was a little better around Metzville and in SMY when we have to get out there and do what we can to kind of dig in and report on these guys on a day-to-day basis. And today, not a fun day, of course.

**Craig Carton** (0:48)
For sure. And look, we had Mendy on the show a number of times. I don't claim to know him. I've never met him in person, but I think the first thing before we get into the nitty-gritty of it is, I have, it's a very weird thing today, Todd, in sports, when you have somebody in the high-profile position that Mendoza was in, when there's not a single person on the planet that had a bad thing to say about the guy. He was beloved.

**Todd Zeile** (1:14)
I absolutely agree. And I was and am a personal friend of his and have had an opportunity over the last couple of years to really get to know him, spend some time with him. He's a great family man. His wife and kids are a priority and people that were around us. And so it's sad for me personally, emotionally.
It's a tough day. And knowing him as I do, I think as well, it's like watching somebody, you know, get punched over and over and over again in the ring. And you can see that it's been wearing on him because I think he was sort of defenceless in some ways. And we can get into that a little bit, but great guy, great baseball guy, very honest, great to the media, always forthright, and just a real shame to see what had to happen here.

**Craig Carton** (2:13)
Yeah. Talking to Todd Zeile, obviously a tough day for Carlos Mendoza and an acknowledgement by the Mets that this season is a wrap, which everybody knew prior to the firing this morning.
You know, one of the things that people have discussed, Ron Darling even said it during a broadcast a couple months ago, is that there didn't seem to be a lot of accountability for some of the mental errors or the repeated errors that guys made. And I'm not talking about, you know, booting a ground ball. People understand that's part of the sports where you're going to make an error. But there was a sense that, not that he lost the locker room, but that he might not have ever challenged the locker room or individual players. And I wonder if you could speak to that. As a former player, I'm sure, in your career, you had quote unquote player friendly guys. You probably the guys that ran and raved and broke bats and threw coolers around. And I wonder if you ever felt, like Ron talked about a few months ago, that if there was a weakness in Carlos' game as a manager, it was not the tough love aspect that maybe this team needed.

**Todd Zeile** (3:17)
You know, it's a really, that's an interesting take because I know that as the bench coach in the Yankee organization, he was that guy that had to be trying to good pop, bad pop to Aaron Boone. And Aaron Boone maintained that level of distance and respect and protectiveness of his players without having to really do some of the things that get done behind the curtain. And I think that is a difference in today's game comparatively to when I played. The manager and the bench coach were usually pretty much in unison and the manager was the one, at least on the teams that I played for, that when somebody needed to be aired out, when something needed to be vented in the clubhouse, when something needed to change, it was the manager taking control of that. Now it feels like there's a little bit of separation. And at least from what everything I was told, Mendy was kind of Aaron Boone's protector with the Yankees and was more the guy that had to be the tough love guy in that clubhouse. And I wonder if coming over to the Mets, taking over as the manager, he assumed more of the manager's role that he was used to over there as a Yankee and expected that that be done by somebody else or handled within the locker room by the veteran guys and there may have been a disconnect. I don't know.