LEAVE WILLIE RANDOLPH ALONE!

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

(I know, that crap is so 6 months ago. But I don't care. It still fits.)

I am going to describe a Major League manager to you. This guy is managing a below .500 team that currently sits in second-to-last place in its division. His high water mark leading this club came in 2006, when they made a run in the postseason, only to have their championship hopes end at the hands of the eventual champion St. Louis Cardinals.

His team followed that playoff run up with raised expectations coming into 2007 season, only to fall apart in the second half of the season, and finish in second place and out of the playoffs. This past off-season, his GM went out and made a blockbuster trade to bolster the team and turn them into a seemingly powerful, and high-priced, championship contender. Expectations were raised once again, and most predicted that his club would win its division again and make it to the World Series. But a shaky start to 2008 has made that look unlikely.

Have you been able to guess who I am talking about?

Of course by now you have figured out that I am describing Jim Leyland, manager of the Detroit Tigers. Right?

The fact is, there have been a lot of parallels between the fortunes of the 2006-08 Detroit Tigers and the 2006-08 New York Mets. However, one thing that is most definitely not in parallel between these two situations is the amount of blame that the respective managers have been given for the teams' underachievement. While Leyland, manager of the 32-37 Tigers (and their $138.7 million payroll) has escaped heat, Willie Randolph, manager of the 33-35 New York Mets (and their $138.3 million payroll) has seen his job status deteriorate to the point where he is basically day-to-day.

Randolph -- who as I am writing this is still employed, but by the time you are reading it, who knows -- was reportedly told that his job literally hung on how his Mets performed in this weekend's series against the Texas Rangers, a series that the Mets won 2 out of 3 in. For the time being, let's just ignore how stupid it is to base a manager's future on something as arbitrary as one single three-game set in the middle of June. Let's instead take a look at what has gone wrong to this point.

In the last week, it has been the bullpen. Last Sunday, Randolph handed a 6-4 lead to his closer Billy Wagner with two outs and two on in the 8th inning. An RBI single and a three-run bomb later, the Mets were on the wrong end of an 8-6 game. Tuesday, the Mets got out of the gates quickly against Arizona, and led 5-1 going into the 5th. After giving up 2 in the 5th, 2 in the 6th, 1 in the 8th, and a backbreaking 3 on two home runs in the 9th, the Mets were looking at a 9-5 loss. On Thursday, the Mets led the Diamondbacks 4-2 going into the top of the 9th when Wagner once again entered the game for the save. Yada yada yada, Arizona won the game 5-4 in 10 innings. That does not even consider Wednesday night's bullpen meltdown, when Wagner blew his second of three saves that week, because the Mets ended up rallying back and winning in the 13th inning.

That's four times Randolph has handed a lead to the guys that are paid to protect leads in the late innings, and they haven't gotten the job done. Is that the manager's fault? If the Mets had won those three that they lost, they would be over .500, ahead of Atlanta in the division, and within 4 games of the lead in the NL East.

Let's now look at the bigger picture: What else has gone wrong to cause the Mets to fall short of expectations? Pedro Martinez, the presumed #2 starter, hurt his hamstring in his very first start of the year and has spent most of the year on the DL. El Duque Hernandez, the presumed #4 starter, hasn't even smelled the field yet this year, having been hurt since spring training. Moises Alou, the presumed everyday LF, broke his hip in an off-season game of canasta (or something. I'm not even sure. I can't keep his injuries straight.) and has missed most of the year. That's three guys that were brought in to play key roles and are always hurt. What about the guys that are healthy? Carlos Delgado has had to get red hot to get his average up to .243 and is on pace for the lowest slugging percentage of his life and the lowest on-base percentage since 1995. And don't even get me started on 2B Luis Castillo, who is constantly begging out of the lineup, and really hasn't been the same player since leaving Florida like 5 years ago.

So what do Martinez, Hernandez, Alou, Delgado, and Castillo all have in common? They were all acquired, either via trades or free-agency, by Mets GM Omar Minaya, the man who has repeatedly threatened Randolph's job. Not a bad gig to be a Major League GM, huh? You load a team up with aging, overpriced, oft-injured underachievers, then blame somebody else when they miss games due to injury and underachieve.

I am not a Mets fan, but if I were, I would be very disappointed at the state of my club. But the man to blame isn't manager Willie Randolph. In fact, as often as Randolph has to read and hear that he is managing for his job, its surprising that the team has held up as well as they have. There is plenty of blame to be doled out for the Mets, but I think that Randolph has received an inordinate amount of it, especially when you compare the performance of the Mets, to the performance of some other teams with skippers that have gotten by scot free. While some managers have gone to the media and called out their GMs for no reason, Randolph, who has been saddled with a mostly disappointing group of veterans past their primes, has remained loyal, and instead been forced to constantly answer questions about his own job security