Watch your back Omar. #2 may have his eyes on you

[xxi-xxv]

Willie Randolph had no chance with Mets' owners and undermining coaches

 

 

From the day Mets GM Omar Minaya hired him in November of 2004, Willie Randolph was set up to fail.

 

The Mets' owners - Fred and Jeff Wilpon - had made a pointed show of giving Minaya full autonomy in the baseball operations, so theyhad no choice but to give their general manager a free hand to hire his own manager.

 

But in settling on Randolph - a Yankee favorite, no less - who had no previous managerial experience, Minaya surprised the Wilpons.

 

Fred Wilpon was enamored of the idea of the Mets becoming racial groundbreakers by being the first New York team to hire a black manager - Randolph, like Wilpon, is also a Brooklyn native - and was mollified by Minaya's contention that he'd picked a manager who would be an asset in working with minority communities in the offseason.

 

The Mets' new TV network was just coming online and Fred Wilpon saw his Hispanic GM and his black manager as valuable to the franchise, describing them in one organizational meeting as "rock stars in this town with our new TV network."

 

Still, the Wilpons were leery about turning over the Mets to a manager with no experience and safeguards were put in immediately.

 

For one, Randolph was given a three-year contract for $1.8 million, which assured him of being at the low end of the industry salary range for the duration. For another, Randolph was allowed to name only one of his coaches - the rest would be provided to him by the front office.

 

Despite their reservations about Randolph, they had to be pleasantly surprised by the way he took command in that first spring training in 2005. There was an emphasis on hustle and discipline not evident in the previous Art Howe era.

 

But even after improving the Mets to 83-79 after a 91-loss season in '04 and then winning the National League East in '06 while falling one game short of the World Series, the forces from within were working against Randolph.

 

Minaya's assistant, Tony Bernazard, was never a Randolph fan and had pushed for Montreal Expos third base/infield coach Manny Acta for the job. Acta was instead hired as one of Randolph's coaches.

 

Having previously served as the Players Association's administrator and liaison with the Latino players before coming to the Mets, Bernazard is regarded by the Hispanic players as a sort of godfather and his constant presence in the Mets' clubhouse before and after games was good reason for Randolph to be wary.

 

In Bernazard, who would become a close confidant of Jeff Wilpon, the Latino players knew they could take their complaints to a higher authority.

And Bernazard was only too eager to point out Randolph's faults to the players, while privately assuring them in the last year that a manager change was coming.

 

For his part, Randolph found out after the successful 2006 season how little support he had from above during his contentious negotiations with Jeff Wilpon for a new contract. At one point, Wilpon told Randolph's agent, Ron Shapiro, that the Mets "could just go out and get another manager" - his way of telling Randolph that the Mets won the NL East in spite of him.

 

Then came the great collapse last year, which reaffirmed Jeff Wilpon's and Bernazard's belief that Randolph wasn't a good manager. Earlier in the year, they had fired Rick Down, the only coach Randolph had been allowed to name, and replaced him with Rickey Henderson, a Hall-of-Fame player who added nothing other than being a good organizer of the pregame clubhouse card games.

 

Jeff Wilpon and Bernazard wanted Minaya to fire Randolph after the collapse, but the GM resisted. Randolph had been his pick and he wasn't willing to blame the entire collapse on the manager.

 

But when the 2008 season began, there was no doubt Randolph's status was shaky, and the chorus of criticism grew: he lacked fire; the players, especially the Latino players, had tuned him out; he was too sensitive to criticism; he was overly defensive; he didn't communicate with his coaches.

 

As it turned out, Randolph's suspicion that his coaches didn't have his back was correct.

 

As the season began in earnest, Jerry Manuel, Randolph's bench coach, began to see where the real source of power was in the Mets clubhouse and gravitated toward Bernazard. On numerous occasions, Manuel was said to have complained to other members of the organization about Randolph being late with the lineup every day. According to club sources, Manuel also wasn't shy about suggesting that Randolph was overmatched in game situations and that he refused advice from his bench coach.

 

So it was no surprise when reports began circulating three weeks ago that Randolph was days away from being fired, along with pitching coach Rick Peterson (whom Bernazard also despised) and first base coach Tom Nieto. The reports had Manuel being named to succeed Randolph.

 

Still, Minaya resisted the pressure from Jeff Wilpon to fire Randolph. It wasn't until Randolph made those ill-conceived, ill-timed remarks about race being a factor and the Wilpon-owned SNY network not judging him fairly that he lost Fred Wilpon's support.

 

In retrospect, the stay of execution, which extended through a disastrous 2-5 road trip to San Francisco and San Diego and a 3-3 homestand against Arizona and Texas, was almost as cruel as Randolph's midnight firing in California last Tuesday, after the Mets had beaten the L.A. Angels in the first of a three-game interleague series. Cruel because the decision had been made to fire him three weeks earlier, delayed only because Minaya could not bring himself to bring down the guillotine.

 

Finally, with Johan Santana scheduled to pitch the second game of the Angel series and with upcoming back-to-back series against two last-place teams creating the prospect of a Mets winning streak, there was a new urgency from the high command to fire Randolph before it became too difficult to justify it.

 

That is why Minaya so clumsily executed the firing. He took pains to say the decision was his alone because that's what he was told to say. It's pretty clear he didn't want to make the call, that he still wasn't convinced his man couldn't right the ship.

 

Instead, he blamed the firing on the pressure from all the leaks about Randolph's status.

 

He never mentioned the sources of those leaks, although if the Mets fail to make the playoffs, he can be assured those same reports will start leaking out about him.

 

Even now, he has to realize it was a no-win situation into which he brought Willie Randolph, just as Randolph probably knows that, through it all, Minaya was the only one who ever had his back.

 

Bill Madden NY Daily News

[TaylorBanksCarsonVanPelt]

Jesus H. Christ. Talk about crabs in a barrel....or maybe something minority members might empathize with a little more...."like cockroaches in a box, with a big shoe ready to come crashing down, but the cockroaches keep on eating each other". I was never a fan of Willie primarily because of the childish reason that he was an ex-Yankee. But boy was he laid out to dry. What the fuck kind of situation is that...you are the manager and can only name one coach.

 

I would not give a fuck if I did not manage for the next 30 years...you can kiss my ass. I am bringing a lot to your organization (including the whole historic minority hire) to arguably NY's second team and yet you treat me like you are doing me this huge colossal favor just to look in my direction. Fuck you (Mets Owners) and drop dead...would have been my answer. He would have been better off being the first Elston Howard (as manager) for the Yankee's in the future; rather than licking ass for the Mets.

 

No wonder Black American kids for the most part can give less than a shit about MLB; with all of this tribal horse shit going on. Where you have a Dominican GM being sweated by his owners and other Dominican's to hang out to dry the Black American who helped to right the ship. Shameful.

[TaylorBanksCarsonVanPelt]

Good post 21-25.

[xxi-xxv]

Jesus H. Christ. Talk about crabs in a barrel....or maybe something minority members might empathize with a little more...."like cockroaches in a box, with a big shoe ready to come crashing down, but the cockroaches keep on eating each other". I was never a fan of Willie primarily because of the childish reason that he was an ex-Yankee. But boy was he laid out to dry. What the fuck kind of situation is that...you are the manager and can only name one coach.

 

I would not give a fuck if I did not manage for the next 30 years...you can kiss my ass. I am bringing a lot to your organization (including the whole historic minority hire) to arguably NY's second team and yet you treat me like you are doing me this huge colossal favor just to look in my direction. Fuck you (Mets Owners) and drop dead...would have been my answer. He would have been better off being the first Elston Howard (as manager) for the Yankee's in the future; rather than licking ass for the Mets.

 

No wonder Black American kids for the most part can give less than a shit about MLB; with all of this tribal horse shit going on. Where you have a Dominican GM being sweated by his owners and other Dominican's to hang out to dry the Black American who helped to right the ship. Shameful.

 

Agreed, I think what we can all summize from this is that Omar Minaya is a pretty honorable man, he wanted Willie for what he thought he brought to the table and saw past anything else and basically shitcanned him because he had to and in all honesty it was time.