Filed under: News, Sports | Tags: Baseball, News, Sports, the Mets, the Yankees
Nice win, Willie. You’re fired.
I’m not a Mets fan, so I’d like to think I can be impartial here. By rights, as a Yankees fan, I should be glee-stricken that it’s finally the Mets who can’t keep their house clean and whose front office comes off looking like some pissant, third-world military junta. I’m all for dysfunction on that end of the Triborough Bridge, but not at the expense of Willie Randolph.
From the The New York Times: ”The organization plotted the firing on Monday morning, and Minaya arrived here Monday night but did not attend the game. As Randolph managed the game, answered postgame questions and drove back to the hotel separately from the team bus, Minaya waited.”
The guy, a Brooklyn native, builds a winning record and takes the team to within a Yadier Molina bomb of the World Series. True, there was The Collapse last year — culminating in a demoralizing thumping by the Marlins on the last day of the season. And the sense that he didn’t have the respect of the players. And the stupid things he said about race to a Jersey paper.
But this is the same question the Yankees faced last year with Joe Torre. Was the team’s impotence in the Division Series because of the manager or in spite of him? A so-so team flush with all stars and bad chemistry may not win no matter who is filling out the line-up card.
Maybe I’m not impartial at all. I’m loyal to Randolph for the same reason I was loyal to Joe Torre and for the same reasons (I imagine, though I can’t really speak to this myself) people feel so strongly about Bill Clinton. They were all The Bosses during better times — Torre and Randolph during the Yanks’ 90s dynasty.
But that was then. So the Mets start a whisper campaign that Willie’s card’s been punched, then fly him cross-country for the third time in two weeks, watch the team beat the Angels and climb to within a game of .500, then fire him at the team hotel just after 3 a.m. eastern time. They break the news to the rest of the world in an e-mail.
The Daily News’ Bill Madden wrote: ”In the history of New York baseball, there has not been a more cowardly, indecent, undignified or ill-conceived firing of a manager.”
Yet ESPN.com went so far (creative really) as to pose the question of the circumstances of Willie’s firing to Randy Cohen, author of The New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” column. Sayeth Cohen: “Discourtesy does not necessarily equal unethical behavior.”
Maybe not, but it does burn bridges. Luckily, there are a lot of bridges in New York City. And more than a few lead from Queens to the Bronx. Let’s hope Hank and Hal see the light.
ESPN The Magazine‘s Buster Olney put it like this:
Even the writers of “The Sopranos” could not have invented a more recklessly handled hit. … 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.
Stay classy, Flushing.
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