Not to belabor the unappetizing issue, but the coincidence is too much to ignore. In last week’s column I wrote about readers’ reaction to the sports coverage of the once worthwhile and important New York Times. Within days, a reader sent me a notice the Times had posted online.

My former employer is seeking a new sports editor.

However, before readers of the Times sports section get excited, they need to know the Times is not booting the current sports editor, Jason Stallman, out the door because he prefers cupstacking to baseball. The newspaper’s editors feel Stallman has done such a good job they are promoting him into a more important job. It shows you what we know.

As the reader who forwarded the online job notice wrote, “By the way, the Times has a job listing for a new sports editor but the online job description continues to emphasize the world wide audience without one word about local sports.”

The Times has become so disdainful of local sports that the downtrodden Mets go uncovered by Times reporters. Even when they play in New York (so there is no travel expense), the Times gives its Mets’ fans reader a vanilla account of the game by the Associated Press.

The Yankees generally still get staff coverage – when they get coverage. On one of the days of the recent four-game series with the Red Sox, the game finished too late for the Times’ biggest press run so there was no mention of the Red Sox-Yankees in that edition. When I covered the Yankees, I had to write a story to cover that particular edition. We didn’t ignore the Yankees as if they didn’t play.

But Stallman obviously has no use for baseball so he sees no need to fill that hole before the game is over.

Baseball coverage, however, as the coverage of any sport, is not just about reporting scores. Covering a team requires steady surveillance. Reporters have to be around the team constantly. They have to talk to the manager and players. I can’t imagine how reporters would have survived in the late 1970s and early ‘80s if they weren’t at Yankee Stadium to cover Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner.

Here’s a more current reason for covering the Mets. They are having a terrible season under a rookie manager, Mickey Callaway. Their general manager, Sandy Alderson, has stepped down following recurrence of cancer. A three-headed front office team is doing his job.

Owner Fred Wilpon might say otherwise, but the Mets haven’t recovered from the devastating Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, which severely affected the ability of owners Wilpon and Saul Katz to spend money on players and other necessary elements that help produce a winning team.

The Mets need to make serious decisions, and Times readers know that. But the Times isn’t telling them anything to help them keep abreast of developments. As far as the Times is concerned, none of that matters, if it exists at all. Times readers may know that reality on their own, but they won’t learn anything from the Times. If the Mets were Manchester United or some other noted soccer team, the Times would be all over the story. The Mets? They may as well be the Brooklyn Cyclones.

I found out more about the Mets in the Sports Business Daily last week than the Times told me.

“Mets lean toward traditional GM hire after tumultuous ’18 campaign,” the headline read.

I’m not a fan of the New York Post, but the article quotes the Post as raising a possibility that is far more interesting than the Times’ silence on the matter.

Wilpon, the Daily quotes the Post, is “‘unlikely to hand the organization’s reins to a young, purely analytics-driven GM with whom he would perhaps have difficulty connecting,’ and the growing belief is Wilpon will ‘look toward a more traditional baseball person’ for the role, according to sources cited” by the Post.

Wilpon is also expected to “take a relatively conservative approach with the GM hire after the organization went with an ‘outside the box’ candidate at manager with Mickey Callaway last offseason.”

Some team officials believe the club “became too analytics driven in recent seasons under Sandy Alderson’s watch, and a veteran leader with a pure baseball background would help shift the organization toward the center.”

Alderson “took a medical leave in June” with a return unlikely, and the Mets have since been “guided by a three-headed panel” that consists of Assistant GM John Ricco and Special Assistants Omar Minaya and J.P. Ricciardi. Ricco “has not been eliminated as a possibility for the job.” However, sources said that the Mets are “more likely to hire an external candidate.”

The Alderson observation is sound because when he ran the Oakland A’s in the 1980s and ‘90s, his protégé was Billy Beane, who as Alderson’s successor became celebrated for the “money ball” era.

But the Times hasn’t felt it necessary to inform its readers of any of this and will very likely play “catch up” when the Mets announce the identity of a new general manager. Mets fans, meanwhile, have to seek news of the Mets elsewhere.

BUT CAN WE PUT BASEBALL IN THE PAPER?

Not wanting to force readers of this site elsewhere, I provide you with the Times post of its search for a sports editor. You apply at your own risk:

Job Description

Sports Editor

From the World Cup to the Olympics to LeBron James’s long and winding road, New York Times readers are captivated by sports coverage. The primary task of the next Sports editor will be to ensure that Times coverage is central to the sports conversation, whether it’s soccer in Europe, free agency in the N.B.A. or corruption at the Olympics. The Sports desk has become an engine of innovation for the newsroom and the next Sports editor must keep that digital momentum. The editor should lead a desk that breaks news, delivers memorable features, lands major investigations and introduces many new readers around the world to Times journalism.

Candidates should be able to:

• Present a vision for Sports coverage in an increasingly international and digital New York Times.
• Conceptualize and execute ambitious investigative projects.
• Work closely with graphics editors and other visual journalists to produce visually innovative work.
• Motivate and nurture the careers of journalists of all experience levels.

This is an excluded position.

The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives, which can only come from diversity of all types, across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing for our business. So we strongly encourage women, veterans, people with disabilities, people of color and gender nonconforming candidates to apply.

If you are an active employee at The New York Times or any affiliates, please do not apply here. Go to the Career Worklet on your Workday home page and View “Find Internal Jobs”. Thank you!

HE GETS PROMOTED

In a separate memo, the top three Times editors, led by executive editor Dean Baquet, issued a memo to the Times staff explaining the development that made a new sports editor necessary:

After interviewing many, many candidates for what one applicant called “the most exciting project in journalism today,” we are thrilled to announce the first hires for our coming TV news show, “The Weekly.”

Our executive producer will be Mat Skene, an award-winning journalist who has just completed a Nieman fellowship after a long and successful run at Al Jazeera, where he created and oversaw “Fault Lines,” the investigative current affairs program. Mat’s show broke ground on major stories — Haiti, Ferguson, Trump’s travel ban — and pioneered a visceral style of on-the-ground reporting. His show won a pile of awards — two Peabody Awards, an Emmy, nine more Emmy nominations — but we tapped Mat to lead the show because of his journalistic curiosity, his track record as a leader, his passion for innovative storytelling and his ambition to create a new dimension in Times journalism. As executive producer, Mat will serve as the bridge between the Times newsroom and Left/Right, our production partner, and will be responsible for turning our signature reporting into can’t-miss television.

He will be joined by Jason Stallman, one of our most creative deskheads and a driving force in digital journalism. Jason will be leaving Sports to become the editor of “The Weekly,” where he will partner with journalists on every desk to determine what kinds of stories the show tells, and how we tell them. His relationships and credibility across the newsroom will be crucial in establishing the show as a premier outlet for our most ambitious work. Jason turned the Sports department into a laboratory of innovation and has been a pioneer in leading groundbreaking collaborations across desks, disciplines and continents. He’s a master at narrative – ask Sarah Lyall or John Branch — and a bulldog on news. (See concussions in the N.F.L.; Russian corruption at the Olympics; cheerleaders and #MeToo; a battery of FIFA scandals.)

All right, enough of that intramural boasting. If the Times were that good, it wouldn’t be struggling to come up with gimmicks to attract readers, viewers, call them what you want.

The reality is newspapers are dying. People don’t read them anymore. Young people don’t read anything. In the early days of this website, it briefly attracted younger readers who couldn’t get away from it fast enough.

I became certain there was an early warning system in which a 20-something reader would stumble on the site, see that it was 900 or 1,000 words that he would actually have to read and immediately send out an e-mail warning other 20-somethings, “Look out. He’s at it again.”

I was pleased that it didn’t take long for those viewers to abandon the new ship and not return, leaving the site to those who enjoyed reading about baseball. Now, though, we have to deal with the Jason Stallmans of the digital world.

I have a friend my age who has spent – and still spends – his life reading newspapers. He carries them under his arm wherever he goes. He used to be a baseball writer, a darn good one. What does this mean? Old baseball writers don’t die? They just keep reading newspapers?

SELIG ON BONDS: NO COMMENT

Last week MLB.com had a display noting that on that date Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s career home run record with No. 756. I don’t recognize Bonds as the holder of the career or single-season season home run record holder, but I was curious what Bud Selig thought of the MLB.com designation. Selig was Aaron’s No. 1 fan, and he had no use for Bonds.

To find out, I sent an e-mail to Selig’s spokesman, Rich Levin, MLB’s former media relations director.

“He is not talking about this or most other baseball subjects,” Levin replied, “now that he is well into retirement.”