There’s no doubt Buck Showalter has seen baseball games play out in just about every which way they can. At the helm of four different teams over 20 seasons since 1992, Showalter has managed over 3,000 games–winning about half of them. He arrives at the Mets with more managing experience than the last four Mets managers combined.

While some will point to that experience (just 23 postseason games after 3,068 regular season games) and think he doesn’t have what it takes to get the Mets all the way, Showalter understands that winning a World Series (plural, if you ask Steve Cohen) is the expectation. The goal “is to be the last team standing,” he said when Billy Eppler, Sandy Alderson, and Cohen asked him why he wanted to manage again.

But within that process, which he was upfront about it being hard to do, Showalter talked about “impacting people’s lives,” and, “trying to give them shortcuts so they don’t step on their tail like I did.” It’s that sort of experience that the Mets haven’t had since at least the Terry Collins days that they were looking in for their new manager.

The 65-year-old came off as charming but direct in the press conference, which might be what a team with a healthy mix of stars, up-and-comers, veterans, and fringe starters needs. While there will be a handful of new veteran Mets, no player on the 2022 version of the team is a stranger to having a tough game, week, month or year. But here once again is where Showalter’s leveled experience was on display.

He said he wants players to arrive at the ballpark with an “open-mindedness about what happened,” whether that be after a loss or a bad season. “We don’t want to repeat the past, whatever it was. You don’t want them to think that you think that’s going to be the case forever.”

His job as a manager, he says, is making sure that the player knows what he wants. The player’s job description is, “What do they want to be about?” The Scherzer’s and the deGrom’s and the Lindor’s of the world likely know the answer to that question. It’ll be up to Showalter to help the rest of the roster in their discovery, noting that it’s up to him to adjust “to the needs of the team,” with every player having different expectations for themselves while part of the team as a whole.

How each player performs will likely be in part due to their acceptance and understandings of information provided by the analytics department. (We covered Showalter’s comments about his excitement to work with the performance teams earlier.) That’s part of a manager’s job now. He mentioned talking to Dusty Baker, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Maddon to talk about how the manager job as a whole has changed since he last led the Orioles in 2018.

Overall, though, “it’s going to be a priority, you know, from day one to put a product out there that everybody can be proud of,” Showalter said in his opening remarks. However, “there no magic dust,” Showalter said, and you can’t wish your way to winning baseball games.

There’s an “accountability, responsibility” to owning up and confronting when something isn’t right with the team or an individual player. “It’s not for everybody,” he repeated twice. “But we’re gonna find out who it’s for.”