The Mets are denying a report that said COO Jeff Wilpon ordered the firing of hitting coach Dave Hudgens on Monday.
According to the report in Capital New York, an angry text message and phone call from Wilpon to general manager Sandy Alderson on Monday prompted Hudgens’ dismissal from the organization. Alderson fired Hudgens after a 5-3 loss to the Pirates and named Lamar Johnson the hitting coach.
“The reports are substantively inaccurate and erroneous,” the Mets said in a statement Wednesday.
But Alderson, in speaking to Capital on Wednesday, didn’t completely douse the story, saying the decision was reached after consulting with “many” people, including Jeff Wilpon. Alderson also didn’t dispute the sequence of events, according to Capital, but said the decision to fire Hudgens had been “in the works for some time.”
A day earlier, Alderson was asked specifically if ownership was pressuring him into making changes.
“What I try to do is evaluate what’s going on on the field and make the appropriate judgments, and that’s my responsibility,” he said. “I talk to ownership from time to time. I talk to Fred [Wilpon]. I talk to Jeff [Wilpon], and I have a sense of what they’re thinking or what their frustrations may be, but ultimately I have to make a baseball decision, I guess, and that’s what this was.”
When asked Monday about the reasons behind Hudgens’ dismissal, Alderson said the team’s “situational hitting is not where we want it to be.”