Reporter involved in Mets incident tells his side of Mickey Callaway exchange

Sunday’s incident in the New York Mets clubhouse — in which manager Mickey Callaway cursed at a beat writer and pitcher Jason Vargas said he would knock out the reporter — has the team all over tabloid back pages for all the wrong reasons and has given people another reason to call for Callaway to be fired.

So how did it all start in the first place? By all accounts, it was Newsday’s Tim Healey telling Callaway he’d see him tomorrow. The manager took that as a sarcastic barb and went off on Healy.

Healy shared his side of the story with Newsday and denied he was being, as Callaway said, “a smart-(expletive).”

“I couldn’t confidently tell you exactly what (Callaway) said, but he said, ‘You know we’re going to be in a bad mood after a loss,’ or something like that. And I tried to tell him, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just saying I’ll see you tomorrow. And then he said, ‘Get this guy out of here,’ and that got the attention of Jason Vargas.”

Healy did say he noticed Vargas staring at him while the exchange with Callaway was happening and that he asked “if everything was OK or if there was something he wanted to say.” But some accounts said Vargas “charged” at Healy, which the writer said was perhaps too strong of a word to describe Vargas’s move toward him.

But again: Healy stressed he didn’t mean anything when he told Callaway, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”