The Phillies’ decision to move on from Kevin Long after the 2026 season does more than clear out a hitting coach. It throws a bright light on a couple of Mets decisions that still hang around as classic “what if?” moments.
Long won’t be back in Philadelphia for the 2027 season, and the firing feels like one of those offseason moves where a club is pointing a finger at the easiest target. That may be harsh, but it’s the reality of the job. He’s been around the block for a long time, serving in the same role with the Mets from 2015 to 2017 before moving on to the Nationals from 2018 to 2021.
His resume in that stretch is hard to ignore. Long gets credit for Daniel Murphy’s late-2015 power burst in the postseason, and the two even linked back up briefly when Long joined Washington. Murphy was traded during the 2018 season, but the Nationals later rode a 2019 roster that featured rookie Juan Soto as one of its stars all the way to a World Series title.
By this point, Long is hardly some transient coach learning on the fly. He spent 2007 through 2014 as the Yankees’ hitting coach, and with two decades in essentially the same lane, he’s become one of the more seasoned swing teachers in the sport. He’s also spent his career parked in a pretty tight Northeast corridor - New York, then Washington, then Philadelphia - so it’s fair to wonder whether the Van Nuys, California native wants to keep working in this part of the country or finally head back home.
That’s why the Phillies’ move makes him such an obvious name for the Mets to at least think about in some capacity. More importantly, it drags one old Mets fork in the road right back into view.
What if the Mets had hired Kevin Long as manager instead of Mickey Callaway?
Long was in the mix to replace Terry Collins before eventually leaving for Washington. The Mets went with Callaway, a pitching coach from the Cleveland Indians, apparently believing the club would benefit from that kind of background. The thought process was understandable enough on paper, even if the result never worked.
Callaway was not embraced in Queens. He was inexperienced for the job, and years later his reputation took another hit when he was accused of lewd behavior by several women. On the field, the Mets never really found traction under him, and he became part of the noise around the 2018 and 2019 teams.
Those teams had their own circus going, with Brodie Van Wagenen also in the mix as another hire that fit a different role better than the one he got. That said, BVW doesn’t take the blame for Callaway; he arrived a few weeks later.
Long, by contrast, kept building his reputation elsewhere. He thrived with the Nationals and then the Phillies, and he’s been viewed as a strong hitting coach for years.
The Phillies dumping him now feels a lot like the Mets moving on from Jeremy Hefner - something had to give. New York’s pitching underperformed in 2025 the same way Philadelphia’s offense sputtered in 2026.
Of course, nobody can say how the Mets would have looked with Long in the manager’s chair in 2018, because he’s still never had a big-league managing job. The irony is that the Mets eventually drifted away from the pitching-first identity that was part of the Callaway era anyway, helped along by the 2019 juiced baseballs and Pete Alonso’s wild rookie season.
So no, Mets history probably doesn’t get worse if Long is the hire. The bigger ripple might be felt in Washington, where Long likely wouldn’t have been the hitting coach for that 2019 championship run. And maybe, just maybe, the club would have gained some coaching continuity from the Collins era into Long’s tenure instead of bringing in an outside voice that wasn’t really needed.
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