Rounding the Bases – The End of the World Edition

You know, until today, I hadn’t given much thought to the Cubs/Rays series starting tonight. But then someone on the Cubs.com message board pointed out a thread calling the Cubs an illusion. Really? A Rays fan calling the Cubs an illusion? The Rays? A team that had not had a winning season in its entire existence until this season? The Rays? The Tampa Bay Rays? You’ve got to be kidding me!

This is why I don’t write for a living…

Mike Vaccaro in today’s NY Post

ANAHEIM – The e-mail was time-stamped 3:14 a.m., Eastern time. In a simpler time, in a different world, maybe the Mets would have succeeded completely in this cowardly purge of their baseball team. Maybe then they would have been able to hold off on telling everybody what they’d planned to do until long past their vessels in the media were fast asleep.

Ah, but there is this wonderful thing known as the Internet now, and here we are, telling you that while you were sleeping, at 3:14 a.m. New York time, at 12:14 a.m. California time, two hours after the Mets beat the Angels 9-6, the Mets finally got around to firing Willie Randolph.

Maybe that seems a simple proclamation. Maybe you think everyone knows about the Internet. Well, the men who run the Mets are quite obviously simple men, and sinister men, cowards cloaked in “no comments,” who have seen the way their baseball team has performed this year obviously decided: People don’t just need to be fired.

They need to be humiliated.

What a crowd, these bums are, all of them, from the Wilpons at the top to Omar Minaya down below, all of them who conspired to botch this firing worse than any firing has ever been botched. Ever. You wouldn’t trust these guys to run a 7-11, let alone a National League baseball team. What a joke. What a cowardly, dastardly joke.

A midnight massacre.

A 3 a.m. thrashing.

Disgraceful. Utterly, completely, disgraceful.

And here’s the ridiculous part: They could have gone through the transaction of what they did – firing Randolph, firing Rick Peterson, firing Tom Nieto, elevating Jerry Manuel and Ken Oberkfell and Luis Aguayo and Dan Warthen, at any time across the past few weeks and they would have been perfectly justified.

Hell, if they wanted to raze the whole staff last October, after the epic collapse of September, that would have been all right, too. You may not have agreed with it (although a loud segment of Mets fans surely would have). But that would have simply been a baseball decision. And the baseball was enough to warrant it.

This? This is unspeakable. These men couldn’t have been fired in New York, before heading on a plane and flying 3,000 miles to their doom? They couldn’t have been spared the ignominy of a public perp walk back east, their dignity thrown into their carry-on luggage?

Really?

Is this the best the Mets can do? Is this really what they are about? Can they really consider themselves a professional operation when they do the simplest task in sports, firing the manager, this wretchedly?

It’s entirely possible that Randolph fell on his sword over this one, because it was being swirled that he would be spared and his coaches sacrificed, and if that indeed happened, we will laud him and praise him for that later on. Randolph was never going to be confused with John J. McGraw as a manager. But he wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover as a person, either. We already knew that.

What we know now is that Randolph was so much better than the men he worked for, it’s as if they were playing a different game in a different league. What a fiasco. What a joke. Less than two years after Game 7, less than nine months from opening their signature ballpark, the Mets reveal themselves, again, for what they’ve been for too long.

A cheap, unfunny joke.

Run by a miserable cast of miscreants. Good for Randolph, Peterson and Nieto. They may not know this, but their lot in life just got a bit brighter, getting away from this batch of bums.

Why Willie Randolph, you look like somebody walked all over your grave

Check out the scene in Tombstone where Doc Holliday surprises Johnny Ringo in the woods… I was wearing Ringo’s expression this morning as I headed straight for espn.com where I was greeted with this:

What a fucking disgrace. I understand managers are hired to ultimately be fired but OVERNIGHT after a hard-earned win in California? Good fucking Christ. Why this didn’t happen after the Colorado series, let alone 2007 is beyond me. Why they had to use him as a fucking ping-pong ball is beyond me. I’m not mad about the decision, I’m mad about how it went down. For an image-conscious franchise, they CLEARLY have no idea what they’re doing. My only hope is Omar fired the coaches and Willie said if the coaches go, he goes too. Either way, firing a guy at midnight is classless and disrespectful. Seriously, Bender showed Vernon more respect than what Willie got.

Whatever. Willie was fired as soon as he was hired. He was NEVER given full autonomy of the team, never got to pick all of his coaches, and tried to make chicken salad out of a chickenshit bullpen, not to mention being saddled with a gimpy Alou and a broken-down Pedro. And Omar better watch his back too…from the day he was hired he said how he wanted to make the Mets younger and faster. Nothing says speedy like carrying 3 catchers and having the oldest roster in the game.

Stay classy Mets – you’re making Rachel Phelps look like Mother Theresa.

Random Moosings II

Couple of things I forgot to write about yesterday, so that gives me a reason to write again today.

np: Through the Fire and the Flames – Dragonforce – not sure if this qualifies as speed metal or not, but it is some of the fastest, understandable metal I have heard in a long time. Good way to start the day,

Must be a New York Thing: First you have the New York Knicks doing their damnedest to wrestle the title of “worst run franchise ever” away from the Arizona Cardinals, and now it appears that you have the Mets throwing their hat into the ring for that competition as well. Last night, the Mets fired Willie Randolph. That comes as no surprise, Willie was on life support (and based on his lack of expression or pulse in the dugout, I think he may have been that way for a whole lot of years) and the firing was inevitable. But what makes me laugh is the timing of the whole thing, I am not sure the Mets could have handled this any worse than they did. They decided not to fire Willie after a horrific 3-7 road trip that saw them get swept by the Padres (scoring only 9 runs in 4 games) and drop two of three to the Diamondbacks. No, that might have made some sense. Instead they wait till after the Mets come home and take two of three against the Rangers, then go out west and WIN their game against the first place Angels. You let the manager get on the plane and go all the way across the country, he wins the game, talks to reporters after the game, THEN gets fired? Via a press release? That is bush league right there. Is Eric Bischoff running the Mets? Did they fire Willie via fax? Again, I hate the Mets more than any other team not named the Yankees, and Willie’s firing was deserved. The Mets were a slightly respectable 84-78 in their last 162 (they had been flirting with .500 for several weeks over that span – for the record, the Phillies are 94-68 in that same span) which, when you have a payroll of nearly 140 million is pretty hard to swallow. Jerry Manuel takes over this team, and from what I hear, he has just about as much of a pulse as Willie did. I just can’t see the Mets going on a hot streak in the second half, this team has no heart, and I really don’t think this is what is going to shake them up.