METS ownership, Fred and Jeff Wilpon, completed the impossible. They have made Hank Steinbrenner appear the level-headed baseball owner in town.
They oversee an organization that fired a manager and shot itself. Short of squirting seltzer down their own pants in public, the Mets could not have handled the dismissal of Willie Randolph worse than they did. That sound the Mets are hearing is the rest of baseball laughing at them.
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It would have been impossible to believe the Mets would approve a dumber cross-country flight than the two they allowed Ryan Church to take with the lingering effects of a concussion. But move over into coach, Ryan, here is Randolph flying 3,000 miles to manage a game before being fired. That dismissal was made official at 3:14 a.m. Tuesday with a fax statement. And here we were thinking the dumbest stuff we would ever see involving a manager at that time already had occurred with Randolph’s former skipper Billy Martin.
But you have to hand it to the pie-in-the-face gang running the Mets. This was the baseball version of the Colts slipping out of Baltimore to Indianapolis under the cover of darkness; as another organization’s leadership completely abandoned decency, common sense and accountability.
So let’s sum up, shall we. The two most arduous endeavors in the game are a doubleheader and a cross-county flight without a day off before another game. The Mets made Randolph plus coaches Rick Peterson and Tom Nieto participate in both from Sunday night into Monday morning. In between, GM Omar Minaya met with Randolph and left Shea telling reporters Randolph had both his full support and that of ownership – a quote that both then and certainly now we know to be a lie.
Randolph then managed a team that beat the AL West-leading Angels for the Mets’ third win in four games. He told the media afterward he hoped this was the onset of a strong resurgence, then returned to his hotel and was fired.
This itinerary moved the Mets from simply being indecisive to being buffoonish and mean. They certainly had built a dossier to suggest Randolph had limited clubhouse support and no savant-ism for running a bullpen. His removal had been a topic since the great collapse of last season and that internal call was intensified in recent weeks. So how can you talk about it this long and botch it this badly? That takes a certain kind of un-skill.
The Wilpons portrayed this as Minaya’s decision alone, which leaves us depicting the Wilpons as dishonest, dumb or both. If they really left this whole scenario up to Minaya, the Wilpons must be held accountable for hiring someone completely bereft of foresight. A drunk on a one-week bender would not have let this play out publicly as long as Minaya did, and then resolved it with a plan this ludicrous. But it is hard to believe Minaya really acted alone. Current and former Mets employees contacted yesterday agreed in unanimity that this had Wilpon fingerprints all over it. One former employee said, “Do you think Omar really has the approval to fly cross-country, fire the manager and put out a statement at 3 a.m. without the intimate involvement of ownership?”
So what is missing here is accountability from the people who keep hiring Steve Phillips and Jim Duquette, Art Howe and Willie Randolph. The constant is an ownership that keeps participating in inexplicable pratfalls from trading Scott Kazmir to putting out 3:14 a.m. press releases announcing a managerial firing.
Randolph was the latest human sacrifice made to deflect attention away from the owners behind the curtains. Minaya should know he is being set up to be next. But nothing really changes until the Wilpons do.