Burying the Body

This will be my last Willie Randolph post. Well, unless he justifiably goes postal in the Met front office and kills Tony Bernazard. You see, the Willie Randolph firing has become the encapsulation of the last year and a half of the Met Franchise. Something needed to happen. Nothing did. They talked a lot and did nothing. They dragged their feet and when they finally did the right thing, they fucked it up royally. Willie needed to be fired. It was justified. I liked Willie, but to paraphrase 21st century philosopher Stuart Gilligan Griffin, it is not that I wanted kill Willie Randolph , I just didn’t want him alive anymore. This team under Willie’s tenure took on many different forms. In 2005, it was change. It was about credibility. He had guys shave beards. He had guys wear uniforms a certain way. He instilled the “Yankee philosophy” which in this case meant winning and I may not like the Yankees, but I certainly do like winning. The team improved, the young guys learned and Pedro breathed new life into the franchise.

2006 was the year of Willie Randolph’s New York Mets. That was what they announced every time the team took the field. The next step was taking place. The money invested paid off. The offseason moves for Paul LoDuca and Carlos Delgado provided the team with grit and power. They rolled throught the NL and at the last possible minute Pedro and El Duque were gone. But it didn’t matter. The team performed in the playoffs. Hell, they made it to game 7 of the NLCS. Oliver Perez was great. Johnnie Maine was building a name for himself. Willie was a genius. A true leader. The man. But within two innings, Heilman gave up the Molina home run in his second inning of work, a hurt Cliff Floyd swung away with men on base and no outs and Beltran went down looking. All of a sudden the leader, the genius, started to show some cracks.

As 2007 came it was Our Team, Our Time. 2006 was only one step in the progression. The true rebuilding was meant to get us to 2007. Or so we were told. Willie spent the off season getting an extension and talking up next year. Except 2007 didn’t feel the same. There were holes. Pedro was not going to be around until at least July (end of August as it turned out) and Moises Alou replaced crowd and clubhouse favorite Cliff Floyd. Plus, the optimism and good feeling turned around the team turned in to higher expectations. It was no longer the year long party. It was the grind until the postseason. Willie had to go to the bullpen early every night as El Duque and Tom Glavine gave you a solid 6. Of course the 5th starter was an endless carousel of has-beens and never will-bes. Mets fans got very used to Guillermo Mota. I wouldn’t say Willie liked Mota. He LOVED Mota. And Mota sucked. But he sure did have great stuff. Or so we were told. The Mets were consistent. They never won more than 5 or lost more than 5 in a row. They won series. But they never really pulled away. The Braves and Phillies were always between 3 and 5 games behind. They could never really catch up but they never really went away either. At the end of August, Pedro came back, they buried the Braves, they caught fire and went 7 games up with 17 to play. It was in the bag. Willie was worried about resting his key guys. The rotation needed to be set. The bullpen needed rest. All they had to do was clinch. Well. Well…umm yeah.

Willie’s biggest attribute became his biggest flaw. When the team was doing good, the consistency and steady leadership of a manager is appreciated. When a team gets lackadaisical, sometimes a swift kick in the ass is needed. Well, Willie never was an ass kicker. Or a great communicator. As the team was sliding into the abyss, Willie would mention how it would be sweet when they were sipping champagne. Willie never really conveyed to his team that they need to win to do this. He went status quo. He also had to start Brian Lawrence and Phil Humber in games that meant something because El Duque’s bunion was acting up. That’s right, a bunion. The team’s complacency turned to panic. An overused bullpen was asked to do more. Billy Wagner neglected to tell his manager he hurt himself leaving the manager hanging in the 9th. The Magnificent Jorge Sosa wasn’t so magnificent. Fielders were making errors. Hitters weren’t hitting. Starters weren’t doing extra. Willie looked like he farted for 10 straight days. It was terrible. Even the ending was terrible. I was at Shea when Johnnie Maine almost threw a no-hitter and Jose Reyes decided that the second to last game of the season was the right time to rile up the corpse that was the Florida Marlins. They went into Sunday tied for first. If they won Sunday, they would play at least one more game. Tommy Glavine made sure that didn’t happen ending the season and crushing the hopes of Met fans.

Mets management left Willie dangling for 3 days. Was it fair? No. Should they have fired him then? At that time I said no, looking back I am leaning towards yes. Something that bad, that awful, cannot be swept under the rug. It needs to be acknowledged. Torn apart. Analyzed. Over-analyzed. Given the old how’s your Father. And finally accepted and even embraced in an effort to move on with things. If Willie came out of the shoot acting this way, I think things would have been different. Instead, Willie wanted this swept under the rug. He wanted to turn the page. It’s like trying to get over a death with the body still in the room. It’s impossible. Even after waiting 3 months and getting Johan Santana, it felt like an after thought. Well, I had the World Champion New York Football Giants to deal with as did most of the city. Johan was the cherry on top of the ice cream. Of course Yankee fans like to remind you that the cherry was really their’s but we could have it because they didn’t want it. That takes a lot of joy out of something. Going into spring training there were question marks. Was Pedro healthy? Was Alou Healthy? Was El Duque healthy? (see a pattern) Was Delgado in decline? Would Reyes recover? Would I ever stop asking questions? See, lots of questions. All this team needed to do was come out of the shoot fast and 2007 would have been a memory. A bad memory but a memory just the same. They didn’t. Willie kept messing with the lineup. Even when it worked, he changed things. He kept yanking his starters too early and gave his relievers too much rope. There was more turning the page talk. No acknowledging the problems. Unless the problems were made up in his head. Such as his being booed was racial, or that SNY was showing him in a bad light. Come on man. That is petty shit. How about discussing what is really wrong? The team is playing passionless, awful baseball. The bullpen is being misused. The starters are being given too short a leash. Willie should have done something. Instead, the team and the fans turned on him.

Now, the proper time for his firing was after the Atlanta series. The four game sweep in three days. Before the flight to Colorado. At that point, the initial garbage was spewed, the team was faltering and a change would have been a good spark and a good lesson to that clubhouse. Instead there were meetings, press conferences, crappy votes of confidence and backbiting. With all that, nothing changed. They won some games and then, went and got swept by a bad Padre team. Once again, if you were going to fire him, fire him there. Instead, they let it fester for another week. They promised that Willie was going to be evaluated on performance. Then leaked to the newspapers that he was fired. Covered that up. The team actually started to perform a bit. And for some reason treated Father’s Day like it was Christmas Day and said he would not get fired that day. They ut him on a plane. Had him manage a game and at midnight, Hef’s awful fucking time, fired him after a win. Way to evaluate on performance! Now to fire the guy is one thing. I don’t mean to make it sound trivial. It is the man’s livelihood, but he is also well compensated for it. But a manager is hired for many reasons and one of them is to get fired. It is the nature of the business. But to treat Willie the way they did, that was just wrong. It showed no respect and no class. Something Willie always showed the Mets. The Mets took the simple act of firing a manager and turned it into a distraction and a disgrace. Everything they hoped firing Willie would avoid. It was wrong. It made everything that Willie did wrong pale in comparison.

Why does the Willie Randolph firing resonate so much? Maybe, it is because of everything that transpired the last year. Maybe, we never thought it would really happen. I tend to think it is because of the lack of respect given to the man. We all can identify with not being able to do your job correctly. We have all had bad days, weeks, months and years. We can also understand losing a job. Even if we think it may not have been our fault. But the one true thing we all crave in life, is respect and dignity. If we can be treated that way, no matter what is happening to you or being done to you, then you can live with whatever things come your way. The Mets took that away from a man. No matter how they justify it, they did. And no matter how much you may have wanted this to happen, it makes it tough to stomach. The Mets never wiped the slate clean. They just rubbed it with shit. And we will be smelling it for a while.

Anyway we slice it Willie is now past tense. I will always like Willie. I thank him for the respect he regained for the franchise. I thank him for the dignity he brought to his job. I thank him for making me proud to be a Met fan. I also know it was time for that to end. Unfortunately, the people that fired him, took away from him the exact things I just thanked him for. I will always root for the Mets. I love my team. But I will never forget how they treated Willie. I am constantly getting bombarded with letters and e-mails from the Mets about how much they need me and how much they want me. Buy these seats, get this package. Soon, Citi Field will open. It is making me wonder if they will treat me and many other Mets fans the way they treated Willie.