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June 17, 2008
New York Mets Fire Willie Randolph
I don't usually write about baseball too much anymore in this space even though I continue to watch the New York Yankees as much as ever. However, I'm so astonished by the way that the New York Mets fired Willie Randolph that I couldn't let it go without comment. Teams have to make tough decisions and since it's often hard to get rid of players who are underperforming when a team isn't winning a lot of times the manager is the first one to go. So it's no surprise that Randolph got fired, particularly since there had been rumors for quite some time that was what was going to happen. But to do it after midnight after the first game of a West Coast road trip? (A game that the Mets won by the way.) Pathetic.
I can understand why the Mets might not have wanted to fire Randolph on Sunday since it was Father's Day, so since they were thinking of making this move couldn't they have either fired him on Saturday or waited until the team came back from the West Coast? Now Randolph (and the other coaches who were also fired) who flew out on the team plane will have to find their own way back to the East Coast. I wonder if the Mets let them stay in the team hotel until the next morning or whether they informed them that they'd have to find other accommodations at the same time they were informed they were no longer employed by the team? The way that the Mets handled this could hardly be more classless.
There's some speculation that the announcement came in the form of a press release at 3 a.m. (EST) because the Mets knew it would be past the deadline for all the New York papers and thus would avoid some of the media circus that this would surely generate. That was foolishness if that was their thinking. For one thing they would have been better off getting it in the paper today when Tiger Woods winning the U.S. Open would take some of the attention away from the mess that the Mets made. In addition, it's 2008, not 1988. The internet makes it impossible for teams to keep things quiet. In fact there might be twice as much coverage this way since every reporter who covers the Mets has a story for their respective newspaper/TV/radio station's websites and they'll likely file a second story to appear in hard copies of the paper or on news broadcasts for later today or tomorrow. Not surprisingly almost every article and analysis is almost universally negative, not necessarily with that the Mets fired Randolph but with the way it was handled.
Apparently the players were shocked. Although they had to know this was coming sooner or later, none of them probably thought it would happen in this way. It can't be good for team morale, particularly since it wasn't just Randolph who got canned but two other coaches as well. Some teams respond with a win streak when the manager is fired, but I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't happen here.
Posted by silverdsl at June 17, 2008 04:10 PM