Good morning, Mets fans!

The Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros advanced to the National League and American League Championship Series, respectively, with wins Tuesday.

Atlanta beat the Milwaukee Brewers 5-4, fueled by a Freddie Freeman solo homer off Josh Hader in the bottom of the eighth. The Astros swiftly kicked the White Sox butts 10-1, besting Chicago in four games. The ‘Stros scored 31 runs in four games, and they’ll face the Boston Red Sox starting Friday. Atlanta will play either the San Francisco Giants or Los Angeles Dodgers start Saturday. Those two teams will play game five of their division series tonight.

Now let’s get into the morning briefing.

Latest Mets News

A couple reports came out Tuesday about the Mets front office search:

  • The team is expected to request to interview David Stearns, the Brewers’ president of baseball operations, for their top front office job, according to Jon Heyman, though the Mets aren’t expected to be granted an interview.
  • Billy Beane is reportedly “very much open to the idea of becoming president of baseball operations” for the team, according to John Harper.
  • Buster Olney says the Mets have interest in Dodgers executive Josh Byrnes, which MMO’s Mike Mayer reported last week.

Tomás Nido ran into Conor McGregor at a Target. That’s a fun sentence.

Latest MLB News

The value of the qualifying offer teams can extend to impending eligible free agents is $18.4 million, down from $18.9 million in 2021 and lower than projections. The Mets can extend this offer to Michael Conforto and Noah Syndergaard. The former is expected to decline, while the latter expressed he’d be “honored” to get the offer and would likely accept.

Here are a couple nice stories/snippets about the Red Sox and their players following the ALDS upset over the Rays:

Rob Manfred talked about MLB’s relationship with Sinclair Broadcasting, the company that owns the local rights to 14 MLB teams. Sinclair is planning on building a direct-to-consumer app that hosts all of the company’s regional sports networks, which would partially include MLB games on Bally Sports as well as games from other sports.

Manfred says, though, that MLB will “want to own and control the platform on which” an MLB team’s local rights “will be delivered.” So, there seems to be a butting of heads there. Sinclair wants to have an app where you can watch any team from any of their RSNs, but MLB says they’d want to control any DTC app or company that deals with the local rights of their teams.

MLB Pipeline revealed its First and Second All-Rookie teams. No Mets were featured.

Matt Eddy of Baseball America broke down the runs-per-game at each minor-league ballpark, then combined the averages per organization. The Mets sat right around the middle of the pack with about 10 runs per game across all levels of the minors.

Latest on MMO

Alex Horowitz wrote about Brandon Nimmo‘s above-average defensive season in center field this year.

Dilip Sridhar and Connor Landazuri debated whether Edwin Diaz should be traded or kept heading into the reliever’s final year of team control.

Sue Kolinsky touched on the Red Sox ending the Rays’ season with two consecutive walk-off hits.

On This Date in Mets History

On this day in 1974, the Mets traded for Joe Torre, who played the final three seasons of his career in Flushing before transitioning to coaching. He spent five years immediately after that managing the Mets, who spent basically all of Torre’s tenure at the bottom of the NL East with an overall 286-420 record.

Let’s go Mets!