Original Met

Why is everyone (especially the media types who are throwing a hissy because they were denied their morning-after headlines) so focused on HOW this firing was accomplished rather than THE FACT that it was accomplished?

While you can question the timing and manner of the dismissal, how could anyone in their right mind actually believe Willie would effectively guide this club long-term after the horror of last season, and the Vietnam flashback that has been much of this season? His stubborn, thin-skinned manner (belying his NY background), his inability to connect with his players, questionable ability to handle a pitching staff, and ultimately, the fact he was (wrongly, in my view) given a reprieve after last season and stewarded a club that continued to play the same way as last September meant this move HAD to be made.

IMHO, Willie's stubborn refusal to ever go and manage in the minors, preferring the cushy job as Torre's 3B and then bench coach, ultimately left him clueless about how to react to the slow-motion train wreck that was last September, proving once again that sitting next to a good or great manager doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a good one. You'll find that the common thread among the dozen or so failed interviews Willie went through for managerial jobs was that he came off as unprepared, brusque, pushy and always overplayed the fact that he was a Yankee. And I was always uncomfortable with how he constantly proclaimed himself a "winner." Have you ever heard LaRussa, Leyland, Torre, Scioscia, etc. refer to themselves that way? You're not a winner just because you say you are. In fact, it strikes me as trying to CONVINCE YOURSELF that you're a winner when you're not sure.

And what's wrong with naming Jerry Manuel to take over? Unlike Willie, the guy has a lot of MLB experience, in a major market no less, and had some success. When Willie had a perfect opportunity to make a statement to his team and show some fire (after the blown call on Delgado's HR at Yankee Stadium), he refused to do so, and Manuel at least demonstrated some spark in the dugout.

If he works out, great. If he doesn't, they'll have the whole off-season to find a permanent replacement and get a fresh start to open Citi Field - no Willie and no hangover from Sept. '07. This also means the pressure is on Omar, which it should be. Is the guy who brought Pedro, Beltran, Santana, Maine, Perez, Church et al. but also Burgos, Wise, Castillo and weakened the farm system truly the guy to guide this franchise in the years ahead? He certainly deserves the chance to answer that question now that the pressure will fall squarely on his shoulders.

As for all the trashing of the Wilpons, perhaps you would prefer the omnipresent and estimable Hank Steinbrenner, whose latest absurdity was to blast the NL for not adopting the DH after Wang injured his foot running the bases. And his demonstration of brilliance in stating publicly that Joba should be moved into the rotation. At least the Wilpons stay where ownership should stay - in the background. So many of the people complaining about the Wilpons are the same ones who trashed them in the Art Howe era for not spending enough money, and now blame them for...what...spending too much...perhaps bringing in losers like Santana and Pedro? They get blamed for orchestrating this "midnight massacre" from behind the scenes by the same people who would undoubtedly trash them for being too high-profile if they were more visible and publicly talkative.

This move had to be made, and this is a business. Focusing, as so many have, on HOW it was done is akin to emphasizing the color of a ship while it is slowly sinking into the sea.

freakzilla11

He was not allowed to do his job.

No one is arguing that he didn't deserve to be fired. The way it was handled might be opening people's eyes to exactly how bad it is and has been, especially since 2006 ended.

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Fonzy13

From Buster Olney, Original. Very damning:

The personnel meetings the Mets hold are said by participants to run on for hours, the discussion often turning circular and pointless. And maybe that's when it starts to happen in their organization when they get to the point where the staff members are so beaten down emotionally and intellectually that they don't have the ability to stand up and scream: Are you people crazy? Are you serious? Because this is a really bad idea -- no, no, wait, let's go one step further: It's really just flat-out nuts.

They needed somebody to yell that in the days and hours leading up to the preposterous trades they made in July 2004, when they swapped a 20-year-old left-handed pitcher who could throw 95 mph for a journeyman right-hander who had shown signs of breaking down. When they made the Carlos Delgado deal, they needed a Bill Shatner to scream that they paid five-star prices in salary obligation for Delgado when they really could've made the deal for much less.

In the past month, and especially in the past 96 hours, they needed GM Omar Minaya to bluntly say to everyone in the room that what they proposed to do was embarrassing for the organization, beneath the dignity of any professional business. They needed Minaya to insist they come up with something else.

But instead, the circus played out fully, without the elephants or the tigers but with plenty of clowns lurking in the shadows. Minaya and his assistant, Tony Bernazard, walked around the lobby of the team hotel Monday "like grim reapers," in the eyes of a staff member. And after weeks of leak-fed speculation and boardroom backstabbing and indecision, they did their bidding, fired manager Willie Randolph, pitching coach Rick Peterson and first-base coach Tom Nieto.

Even the writers of "The Sopranos" could not have invented a more recklessly handled hit. The process really started after last season's collapse, when Minaya -- who came to the Mets having been promised full autonomy and, for more than a year, has had all the power of a marionette -- first regressed into lawyer-speak. "Willie is the manager," Minaya said over and over, as if repeating the phrase would somehow give the crafted but flimsy words backbone and fool anyone into thinking that Randolph wasn't one really bad day away from being fired.

When the Mets sputtered in April, the backstabbing began, with Randolph being undermined along the way. Words of Randolph's honest player evaluations in those staff meetings somehow made their way to the ears of players. That left the manager in a brutal position of trying to draw performance out of veterans who heard that behind closed doors the manager wasn't so sure if they had the right stuff anymore. Some on-field staff members doubted whether they could trust the front office.

And when the losing continued, the front-office leaks to the newspapers became rivers of rip-jobs, the leakers inoculated by the fact that they fired first. It's better to blame the manager and his coaches, after all, than to take responsibility. But even after Randolph's demise became a fait accompli, which was sometime in the last days of May, the decision-makers stopped focusing on the change itself and started becoming concerned about properly scripting his firing.

When the Mets finished a road trip with a loss in Colorado on May 25 and had a record of 23-25, the front office already had talked and talked for hours about managerial alternatives, and unenthusiastically decided that Jerry Manuel was likely to be Randolph's replacement. "Everybody is scared to death about this," said one front-office member at the time.

But rather than just firing the manager quickly, there was a very public meeting with Fred and Jeff Wilpon on Memorial Day. Friends of Randolph say he felt like the Wilpons were waiting for him to take himself down, with some impetuous or angry remark; if he wanted to quit, they wouldn't stand in the way. But the Mets wouldn't fire him -- not on a holiday because that wouldn't be the classy thing to do, firing a manager on a holiday. So Randolph walked out and sat side by side in a news conference with Minaya, who continued with the lawyer-speak. They had to pretend everything was good and settled, and that the organization was moving forward.

That wasn't true, of course; Randolph remained just one losing streak away from getting dumped, and the losing streak came last week. Along the way, the Mets' front-office whisperers generated the same kind of leaks that came before Steve Phillips was fired, before Art Howe was fired, before Jim Duquette was shoved aside -- the same kind of leaks that came after the Scott Kazmir trade went bad. Not since the days of the vintage Steinbrenner Yankees has any team leaked the way the Mets leak. By Friday night, the papers reported that Randolph was out, and by Saturday night, the papers reported that Peterson and Nieto were going to be fired.

There was just one last vexing problem: Telling the news to Randolph, Peterson and Nieto directly. The Mets' front office could've done that Saturday, as they sat for hours through a rain delay. Or they could've done the job Sunday. But somehow, the Mets' front office seemed to shrink from the idea of firing Randolph on Father's Day.

By Sunday morning, Randolph -- who might or might not be a great manager but is unquestionably a man of dignity -- almost seemed to be laughing at the absurdity of the situation. He chuckled as he told reporters that, sure, he thought about the possibility he might be packing for a West Coast road trip that he might not last all the way through.

The Mets won the second game of the doubleheader Sunday, just as they had won on Friday, and then Randolph boarded a plane to the West Coast with his coaching staff and flew all the way to California. The Mets won again Monday, their third win in four games -- and that's when Minaya and Bernazard made their move, capping the employment of Randolph and two coaches after midnight. As if nobody would notice.

The announcement came shortly after 3 a.m. ET, but I'd bet that Randolph probably hadn't stopped laughing by then. It's not his problem anymore. The Mets' circus will go on, until somebody stands up and tells them that you cannot possibly do business this way -- and until somebody actually listens.

This was an act of cowardice, Mike Vaccaro writes. The way it was handled was cowardly, Jim Baumbach writes. Step right up and see the saddest show in town, Bill Rhoden writes. One of the players said he was in shock.

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We
Are
****ed! (WAF)

The WAF Pledge of Allegiance

Under water grottos, caverns


Filled with apes


That eat figs.


Stepping on the figs


That the apes


Eat, they crunch.


The apes howl, bare


Their fangs, dance . .

Yes. We. Do.

Medfordian Slip

The handling of this situation was worse than anything The Apprentice ever showed on TV.

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Cramped, dirty, smelly...Yankee Stadium is every bit the dump Shea Stadium is, only with less room to move around. Good riddance to the House Steinbrenner rebuilt. Busyman

Gregory Gewirtz

Hardly anybody denies that Willie had to go and that he should have been fired sooner. Long-term, it was the right decision on the merits (in a "better late than never" sense). However, Wilpon and Omar left themselves susceptible to being raked over the coals by letting speculation build up for days before pulling the plug. Doing it after one game on a road trip and in the middle of the night gives the whole thing an off flavor.


If Manuel proves himself to be a better in-game manager than Willie and more proactive in changing the roles of the players, he might earn the right to stay. However, it's troubling that he has a reputation as being an extremely laidback manager when it seems as though the Mets could possibly benefit from a more intense personality and it's troubling that Manuel had a lot of the same criticisms levied at him when he was fired as Randolph has today.


Omar needs to go, period.


There's a middle ground where an owner is both hands-off and silent day-to-day but takes responsibility for baseball decisions when a major decision needs to be made. Wilpon seems out of touch by not cashiering Willie and Omar either in September 2007 or at the end of May 2008. It's also bizarre that Wilpon won't take some responsibility for Willie's firing, painting him as disingenous. And again, Olney's blog makes the whole organization seem inept, which at the end of the day is Wilpon's problem. The whole situation feels like a historical reenactment of the problems that became apparent in 2004. I understand the general suspicion that Wilpon leaves something to be desired in terms of assembling a competent baseball organization.

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