Springtime was not kind to New York’s baseball teams. For the Mets and Yankees, April and May brought not hope, but dismay. Both teams looked as if they would be lucky to finish the season without losing more games than they won. Injuries hurt—Alex Rodriguez, Phil Hughes, Moises Alou and Pedro Martinez all went down early in the season—but more than anything else, the teams looked sloppy and apathetic.

Now, in midsummer, the bad old days of spring have been banished. The Mets are in first place in the National League East as of July 29. The Yankees are in third place, just three games behind this year’s surprise team, the Tampa Bay Rays, in the American League East.  read more »

The last days of the Willie Randolph era, much like the Mets’ historic end-of-season collapse in 2007, were both tragic and horrible to behold.

On June 15, at the end of a long, seven-hour day at a stadium that will be pulverized and paved into a parking lot later this year, the Mets announced their attendance for a Father’s Day double-header at 55,438. That was laughably deceptive.

Seats were empty all afternoon, and by the time the second game started—the Mets dropped the first half of the double-header to the Texas Rangers—it was quiet enough for the players to be able to hear the yelled suggestions of individual fans: “Carlos! Hit it to third base! They got a shift.  read more »

The Mets had no shortage of disappointing losses during Willie Randolph’s tenure, but the team chose to fire him, along with pitching coach Rick Peterson and first base coach Tom Nieto, around 90 minutes after Monday night’s 9-6 victory over the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Randolph will be replaced by former White Sox manager Jerry Manuel; Dan Warthen, who had been the Mets’ pitching coach at AAA New Orleans, will assume Rick Peterson’s duties. AAA Manager Ken Oberkfell and AAA coach Luis Aguayo will also join the staff.

Randolph’s fate was the subject of speculation since the end of the 2007 season, one in which the Mets lost a seven-game lead in the National League East with 17 games left to play, one of the biggest collapses in baseball history.  read more »

It is commonly assumed that if Joe Torre had been a free agent, rather than property of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he, and not Willie Randolph, would currently be manager of the New York Mets. That chorus will likely quiet a bit after the Mets completed a 5-2 homestand by defeating the Dodgers Sunday night, 6-1.

But the funny idea of the whole Torre-for-Randolph idea is that there’s no evidence that the aspects of Randolph’s managing that have come under fire most—his lack of demonstrated passion, his deference to veterans and his problems managing his bullpen—would have altered with this particular regime change. After all, Randolph learned his style by Joe Torre’s side as a bench coach for much of Torre’s Yankee tenure.  read more »

The New York Mets are, in a word, awful. After collecting a cadre of superstars with big contracts and making a series of pretty shrewd trades, the Mets have lost more games than they’ve won during the first two months of the 2008 season, this after they made baseball history last fall with an ignominious collapse that cost them a spot in the playoffs.

A good many Mets fans think they’ve identified the problem: His name is Willie Randolph, the team’s manager.  read more »

Speculation about Willie Randolph’s hold on his job as manager of the New York Mets seems to be reaching a breaking point. First, Randolph was forced to apologize for public comments that, among other things, asserted that the SNY network, which is owned by the Mets, slanted coverage against him. Then he and the Mets proceeded to lose six of seven games to the Atlanta Braves and Colorado Rockies.

When Randolph reached out to Mets ownership, his call was reportedly returned by General Manager Omar Minaya.  read more »

Let this be a lesson for managers and coaches in New York: When your team is down, don't pick a fight with the media.

Willie Randolph, the Mets manager whose team is now under .500, has made two mistakes this week, at a time when his job is looking more and more unsafe.

Randolph told the Bergen Record that he was getting a lot of heat from the media because he's black, and that SNY--which the Mets organization owns--delighted in catching him at unflattering moments in the dugout.

He asked to speak with the Mets' owners, the Wilpons, to apologize, and his offer was rebuffed (instead, he spoke to the team's GM, Omar Minaya).  read more »

It is a peculiar irony of this largely disappointing Mets season that one of the loudest sustained cheers any player at Shea received this year was on Sunday, May 11, for left-handed reliever Scott Schoeneweis, quite possibly 2007’s least popular Met.

Schoeneweis kept a sense of humor about the fan reaction. He claims never to hear plaudits, only criticism. Therefore, on Sunday, he heard only an absence of boos.  read more »

After the loss to the Marlins that ended the Mets season, Willie Randolph spoke to his team and cried.

"I told my players this is a life lesson in baseball and in how to become champions," Randolph said to reporters afterwards. "And when you get to that road you have to seize it because you never know when it's going to come again."

The speech Randolph gave his team was a rare one. His attitude during a disastrous 5-12 run over the season's final 17 games was to reaffirm his faith in his players publicly, and to let them play without any undue managerial interference.  read more »

After another hellish Mets loss last night that capped what may be the most dramatic collapse in franchise history, Willie Randolph, again, stood behind his players.

“I’m never going to question the character of my team,” he said during a post-game press conference. “Just cause you lose or get into a rut doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your character.

“I know these guys and they want this very badly. Right now, it’s just tough to get a win.”  read more »