Bank Shot

Lot to consider in Buster Olney's ESPN.com blog post this morning on Willie's firing. Let's to it, gentlemen and ladies.

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.

Sounds awful. Any examples?

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.

Well. Nobody (still) here thinks Victor Zambrano was an advisable acquisition, but to be sure, Omar Minaya didn't make that trade. As for the Delgado deal being preposterous, well, I just couldn't agree less. Yes, the contract was always long and large, and yeah, he's turned into a huge liability with the bat. But flags fly forever, and in 2006, when the Mets were fairly close to getting a shot at a title, Delgado whacked a cool 38 HR, knocked in 114 runs, and posted a 35.2 VORP, which ain't half bad.

Here was Buster Olney at the time:

If, in fact, the Mets part with their top pitching prospect to get Delgado, while absorbing all of Delgado's financial obligations, they are insane. They could offer a bag of balls at this point and Florida will take a deal, so long as the Mets are taking the contract. ... But the trademark of Omar Minaya's dealings so far is that he overpays for everything. He can get Delgado, and that's great. But why overpay for him? Why not tell the Marlins, Look, you don't have teams beating down your door to take his contract. We'll do you a favor and take his contract, and you'll take one Grade B-minus prospect from this list of three, along with this backup Class A catcher, and you'll be thrilled with that. Landing Pedro, Beltran, Wagner, Delgado, all good. But at some point, the bill is going to come due, and the Mets at least have to try to pay market value, rather than spending above and beyond that in each and every deal.

This was wrong then, and wrong now. If you want to criticize Omar for playing "Win Now" baseball, fine. It was a conscious mindset, and several resultant moves were out-and-out atricious. But Buster wasn't criticizing the big picture; that he likes fine. He thought the Mets were giving up too much for Delgado, and that just wasn't the case.

2006 Yusmeiro Petit: 26.1 IP, -11.1 VORP, which is almost impossible (that's what a 2.09 WHIP will do for you)
2007 Petit in Arizona, traded for Jorge Julio: 57 IP, 8.0 VORP (1.33 WHIP, 4.58 ERA)
2008 Petit: 7.2 IP

Mike Jacobs, meanwhile, has put up seasonal VORPs of 12.2 and 10.5 with the Fish, and has a fancy .276 OBP so far this year. If you want to criticize the Delgado deal on opportunity cost grounds, I'll buy it. But only in an extremely ungenerous sense was the trade "preposterous."

More Buster.

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.

This is extremely unclear. Something else other than firing the manager? Like firing the GM?

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.

Again, this is all very unclear. Who is the "they" doing "their" bidding? Whose bidding? Kind of important.

Even the writers of "The Sopranos" could not have invented a more recklessly handled hit.

Timely.

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.

This is all nasty stuff, especially the stuff about trashing Willie in front of the players. Bernazard is apparently the guy at fault here, and I don't like the sound of that one bit. But this stuff about Minaya being a marionette lacks context and bite. First of all, says who? Second of all, if he's a puppet, let's have a name for the puppeteer. Again, none of us are stupid, and we can probably all guess which Wilpon is pulling the strings in this particular case. But then again, none of us are the lead baseball analyst for the biggest sports media company in the world, and none of us have quite the same responsibility to come out and say what we mean.

Did Jeff Wilpon have it out for Willie from Day One, and has this fella Bernazard been doing his bidding? Is Omar completely emasculated here, and no longer one of "the decision-makers?" If so, some quotes to that effect would be in order, even if they're of the anonymous, Todd Purdum variety.

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.

Not good enough.

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.

All true enough. But if the Mets are quite so sieve-like, can't we get anyone to put some words to the situation? Buster's saying here, more or less, that the Wilpons' people were selling Willie out to the media? But can't he get someone else in the organization to confirm this? Or anyone to even allege it? Everyone can't be a company man. This is just lazy.

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.

It was pretty obvious, yeah.

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.

Since Omar and Bernazard have, according to basically every other source, been working at cross-purposes regarding Randolph for quite some time, lumping them together doesn't really fly. Also, Buster's attributing a lot of agency to his marionette.

Look, either Omar is in charge, or he's not. If he's not, then he can't be expected to have people listen to him, or to change the situation. And if that's the case, then I want to see someone called out on the carpet. It's tough to tell, because his writing is so poor, but Buster apparently believes that Jeff Wilpon has helmed, for a long time, a leaky, ill-run organization -- there's no other reason to include the crap about the Kazmir trade. If this is the case, then the jibes about Omar using "flimsy words" and "lawyer-speak" are just mean-spirited. What's he supposed to do?

So let's stop the pussy-footing around, and name some names here. We're a big boy, we write for the Worldwide Leader. You can stand up to a few cable magnates now and again.