I have to say that I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when Willie Randolph signed on to be manager of the Mets. Willie had worked so hard and strove so many years for an opportunity to manage, enduring endless interviews. When the opportunity came it was in New York and with the Mets, the team that seems to permanently have the word “hapless” appended to its name.
The reason for my trepidation for him is this: Bad things happen to people who go to the Mets, especially good people.
Do you know that the moment he was fired, he was no longer a member of the team and was, therefore, responsible for paying his hotel bill and for his flight back to New York? Not that Willie Randolph could not afford it, but they fired him in the middle of the night at the other end of the world. By e-mail at 3:17 a.m.
They could have fired him before the team left on this West Coast trip. New York’s voraciously racist sports press had been screaming for his head for months and had been on a death watch for weeks. Willie’s fate was especially acute by the week’s end.
So, why didn’t they fire him after the home series against Texas? Why let the man get on a plane, then fire him in the middle of the night? He could have cleaned out his locker and gone home.
The Mets is a low-class, bush league organization and the Wilpons are cowards.
Willie is class, a winner who was saddled with a team badly assembled by a master cover-your-own-ass general manager, Omar Minaya. They hired Willie, then Minaya cobbled together an over-the-hill gang of Latin players and a spoiled brat of a shortstop, Jose Reyes. Minaya consistently overrates and overvalues the team.
The reason they had “the collapse” last year was because they did not have the players. But they mistakenly thought that they had a good team and that they could win now. So they mortgaged the future of team to get Santana.
The problem for Willie now is that his Mets sojourn may have ruined his managerial career. He may never get another managerial post.
