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May 27, 2008

Prospectus Today

WillieWatch

by Joe Sheehan

"Fi-re Wil-lie! Fi-re Wil-lie!"
"Free Willieeee!"
"Fi-re Wil-lie! Fi-re Wil-lie!"
"Leave Willie alone!!!"

So it went last night in the waning minutes of last night’s game at Shea, a 7-3 Mets loss to the Marlins. The remnants of a mediocre holiday crowd trying to work up a decent rage against the manager of their disappointing team, and a lone woman, three rows off the Marlins’ dugout, decked out in blue and orange gear, headphones on, holding a styrofoam cup of heaven knows what, defending Willie Randolph to her brethren at the top of her lungs. It might have been noble, had it not been so sad.

Look, I get that it’s New York. I get that Mets fans, the media that covers them, and perhaps even the team's owners and players are all still nursing the wounds created by last September’s collapse that cost the team a division title. I get that the team is in fourth place, with a payroll of $138 million that created expectations of dominance. I was as wrong about this team as anyone, calling them the best team in the NL after they acquired Johan Santana.

What I don’t get is the idea that Willie Randolph is such a critical part of whatever problems exist that he has to go. That’s the only story in this city right now: WillieWatch. Even after a long meeting Monday in which Randolph emerged with his job, there’s an expectation that Randolph could be fired at any time. The increasingly shrill and unfocused invective aimed at Randolph—who admittedly did not acquit himself well by raising the spectre of a conspiracy against him—is wildly disproportionate to the performance of the Mets manager. In three-plus years in New York, Randolph has a 291-244 record and steered his club to one NLCS appearance, and he's the same guy he was over the winter, when Omar Minaya retained him in the wake of that lost September. Minaya recognized that Randolph was not responsible for what happened. The deterioration of the pitching staff that drove the 7-17 finish to 2007 was as much Minaya’s doing as Randolph’s, and the GM worked to fix the problem by acquiring Johan Santana in an effort to bolster the rotation and take pressure off the overworked bullpen.

That said, Randolph isn’t exactly the love child of John McGraw and Casey Stengel. What I find interesting about him is how similar he is to Joe Torre, in that he projects calm and wants to create an atmosphere that allows the professionals in his employ to do their jobs with minimal distraction, recent meltdown aside. Like Torre, Randolph isn’t a very good tactical manager, and it was his inability to manage a high-maintenance bullpen last year that cost the Mets games not in September, when no one was pitching well, but in May, June, and July, when some better choices in-game could have put the division away. For all the talk about the Mets having a leadership problem, no one was making that argument for the first 460 games of Randolph’s tenure, so it seems a bit specious to decide now that the Mets’ real problem is some character flaw in their manager that only surfaced in the last 75.