The Mets’ rookie manager, Mickey Callaway, is, at 42, among the youngest in the job in baseball and part of a growing fraternity whose members are much like him: relatively youthful and inexperienced but molded by contemporary baseball’s focus on analytical information and interpersonal skills.
The manager he replaced was, at 68 years old, the oldest in baseball and oversaw a particularly calamitous 2017 season. It stood out, even for a franchise with a history of late-season collapses.
Callaway has vowed to pull the Mets into modernity. He has showed the hybrid approach of the modern manager, crunching numbers for big, perhaps unpopular, decisions but delivering them with the ease and aplomb of a straight-shooting old friend.