CHICAGO — It is the most prominent item on Billy Eppler’s résumé, making it impossible to ignore.
No matter how many want to see Eppler get this opportunity with the Mets, how many believe he can thrive as the team’s next general manager — and that is a sizable contingent, based on my (highly informal) survey of people both remotely and here at the MLB owners’ meetings — this would mark his second shot at the big chair. His first shot went poorly, producing five consecutive losing seasons with the Angels before owner Arte Moreno dismissed him following the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign.
The Mets could formally announce Eppler as their new head of baseball operations as soon as Thursday, as long as he passes a background investigation, and soon after there will come a news conference in which Eppler will take questions from the media. Many of those questions figure to reach back to his reign with the Angels, which featured more than its share of messy situations and ill-fated transactions.
Eppler of course comes aboard to direct the Mets forward. Yet these hires feature a rite of passage in which one must address the past, account for what transpired, as well as look forward. Eppler surely will be asked about these topics, among others, from his time in Southern California:
1. Tyler Skaggs’ death
Apologies for any appearances of trivializing this tragedy by grouping it along with less dramatic items. Yet the pitcher’s sudden passing in June 2019 (at the team’s hotel in the Dallas/Fort Worth area) from a mix of fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol, the opioids purportedly provided to him by an Angels media-relations official, happened within the club’s baseball operations department while Eppler ran it. The matter remains immersed in litigation.
2. Mickey Callaway
The Angels hired Callaway as their pitching coach for the 2020 season after Joe Maddon became the manager at Moreno’s behest. Callaway, fired from the Mets’ managing job after 2019, worked for one season at that position before The Athletic exposed a flurry of inappropriate communication with female journalists throughout his career as a coach and manager. Major League Baseball suspended Callaway through the 2022 campaign for sexual harassment. Just like his new boss, Sandy Alderson, has faced questions about due diligence on Callaway, since Alderson tabbed him as the Mets’ skipper for the 2018 season, so will Eppler.
3. Sticky stuff
Bubba Harkins, the longtime visiting clubhouse attendant at Angel Stadium, was beloved throughout the industry for decades … until MLB started to crack down on illicit sticky substances that helped pitchers grip and spin the baseball. Eppler fired him in March 2020, and Harkins subsequently went rogue, throwing Yankees ace Gerrit Cole (among others) under the bus and suing MLB for defamation.
4. Free agents and extensions
Eppler’s biggest extension, to Mike Trout, and top free-agent signing, Shohei Ohtani, can hold their own against any other such acquisition/retention throughout the industry during that juncture. Another significant extension, though, the one in November 2017 that prevented trade-import Justin Upton from exercising an opt-out clause, has backfired, Upton excelling in 2018 and then producing sub-replacement value the next three years. Zack Cozart, his priciest free-agent signing before Anthony Rendon, bombed; Rendon registered a terrible 2021 with five years left on his mega-deal; and big-name, one-year gambits like Matt Harvey, Trevor Cahill and Cody Allen didn’t come through. If the pitching signings represented low risk, their failures, with insufficient roster depth behind them, prevented the Angels from rising and Eppler from thriving.
5. The amateur draft
No one from the Angels’ first three drafts under Eppler, 2016 through 2018, has made any considerable impact in the major leagues, although four of the Angels’ top five prospects, as per MLB.com, were selected during Eppler’s reign. Unfortunately for Eppler, he wasn’t able to successfully pick and develop anyone within his five-year window.