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.
There’s a great article in the July Vanity Fair (sadly lost in the Bill Clinton “hatchet job” freakout) that uses a federal immingration case to look at the larger phenomenon of the relatively untapped well of Cuban baseball awesomeness. It’s by Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball,” which you should read for no other reason than it will make you feel smart even if at the end of the day you’re a dumb schlub who still believes in The Art of Being Clutch and that batting average matters. The thesis:
“The U.S. government needed the jury to believe that the American best informed about Cuban ballplayers didn’t know which ones were worth stealing; that he’d refinance his house to smuggle the wrong guys; that Cuba was a mysterious black hole, about which this sort of ignorance was plausible. And it did! After listening for seven days the jury quickly reached its verdict: guilty.”
This is fascinating mainly because it gives a semi-sad, semi-amusing look at the sport Americans love so much as it’s played in a country past generations were taught to fear for so long but which people my age (who only distantly recall the first Gulf War) mostly look at with bemusement. (You were serioulsy afraid of Cuba? Cuba the island? That Cuba?) Cuba is so interesting — to me at least — because it is so unknown at a time when there seem to be so few mysteries and blanks spots left on the map. But even the mystery of Cuba is uniquely American, since it’s self-imposed. We’re the ones who have told ourselves we can’t go there. Terrorist’s can, however. (Lewis hitches a ride with a Canadian baseball fanatic…perhaps the only one .)
And maybe what’s so striking about the connection to baseball is that it paints such a very different image of the institution we think we know so well – a place where the games are played in open spaces at insane asylums, the balls are rationed, beat writers don’t attend games or interview players and the players are paid so little they ride bicycles to the stadium and sell their uniforms to make extra money. And yet they’re consistently the best in the world.
Then there’s what this all reveals about the direction of the U.S. government – and it’s preoccupation with homeland security – post-Sept. 11. If Gus Dominguez, who Lewis describes as small-potatoes sports agent who stumbled only grudgingly into the business, was smuggling Cubans, you could argue his case should be looked at no differently than those of people accused of smuggling immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico, Pakistan, France or Paraguay. (more…)
Filed under: Random, Sports | Tags: Belmont Stakes, Big Brown, Horse racing, Triple Crown
Update: So, he didn’t win. He finished last. Why? Probably, no one will ever know. My point exactly.
You could fairly say the city I live in – and the entire region, actually – is really into horse racing. Like, sometimes-on-the-verge-of-creepy into horse racing.
That’s fine. I have nothing against the sport. But I’m not from here — and I totally don’t get it. I’m told by people who are from here that that’s because I don’t really understand what horse racing is all about: the history, the mystique, the beauty of such powerful animals competing.
No … no I don’t think that’s it.
When it comes to sports, I like humans. When a human outfielder in baseball makes a spectacular diving catch, I appreciate it because, as a fellow human, I can understand just how difficult that was to do.
Or, if the same outfielder falls down while fielding a routine base hit, turning it into an inside-the-park home run, I know he can understand exactly what I’m screaming about his mother — and that gives me a sense of connection to the whole enterprise, ownership, kinship even.
To me, a horse is a horse. They’re big, they run fast — sometimes with little men in shiny pants on top. Going to the track once a year is fun as a spectacle, almost as much to watch the people who really like horse racing as the horse racing itself.
And so Big Brown may win the Triple Crown today. I wish him luck. If he does, my bosses will sell many newspapers, which is always a good day in my book. That horse may make a lot of people big bucks and very happy — or furious. But I don’t think he’ll know it, either way. And where’s the fun in that?
