The Mets are expected to speak with an intriguing candidate for their top front-office opening.
What remains to be seen is whether that candidate would be intrigued enough to end the Mets’ tortured search for a new baseball operations chief.
Multiple industry sources said that Raquel Ferreira, a Red Sox executive vice president and assistant general manager, will converse with top Mets officials in the coming days, with Boston’s blessing. Whether that conversation qualifies as an “interview” could be in the eye of the beholder. It’s believed that the talk will be more of a “Get to know you” session, in which both sides will determine whether they want to take this idea any further.
Ferreira, a Red Sox employee since 1999 and a Rhode Island native, is not a slam dunk to take the job if the Mets offered it to her, multiple sources said. She holds a substantive enough role with the Red Sox that when they fired their president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski in September 2019, Ferreira became part of a four-person group (which ironically also featured Zack Scott, whom the Mets just dismissed as their acting general manager) to run the club on an interim basis until the eventual hiring of Chaim Bloom. Ferreira has a hand in all areas of Boston’s baseball operations.
When Bloom came aboard, the Red Sox elevated Ferreira to an assistant GM position, making her the fourth woman to hold that title in baseball’s history. Since then, one of those four, Kim Ng (an assistant GM with the Yankees and Dodgers), became a trailblazer when the Marlins hired her as the first female general manager in any North American professional men’s sport. Appointing a woman to such a powerful position would carry additional weight for the Mets, who repeatedly drew heat over the past year regarding misbehaving male employees.
Last January, they fired GM Jared Porter, barely a month after hiring him, after revelations that Porter had barraged a female journalist with lewd text messages while he was a Cubs employee in 2016. Days after dismissing Porter, they did the same to minor league hitting coach Ryan Ellis for allegedly sexually harassing female Mets employees. In early February, The Athletic reported that Mickey Callaway acted inappropriately with multiple female reporters while he managed the Mets. He allegedly acted similarly while working for other teams. In May, Major League Baseball suspended Callaway through the 2022 season.
On the day the Mets fired Porter, team president Sandy Alderson said, “We need more diversity at the Mets.”
Meanwhile, a source confirmed that Twins assistant GM Daniel Adler has withdrawn his name from consideration, citing his own inexperience as a barrier. And a source confirmed that the Mets requested permission from the Orioles to speak with their assistant GM and vice president of analytics Sig Mejdal. As of Tuesday night, that permission had not been granted. There is uncertainty within the industry whether Mejdal wants to run a baseball operations department.
Given the timeline of the Mets’ search, set against the baseball calendar, Alderson and his current deputies will almost certainly make the calls on whether to extend qualifying offers to their free agents, a process that occurs five days after the final game of the World Series. Outfielder Michael Conforto is a slam dunk to receive the offer, which calls for a one-year, $18.4 million contract for 2022, and Noah Syndergaard is a possibility.
Unless the Mets’ hiring process concludes this week, then holdovers will need to represent the team at next week’s general managers’ meetings in southern California.
— Ken Davidoff and Joel Sherman in Houston and Mike Puma in New York