Mets 2007 - Post Mortem

Here's how it all unfolded for me on Sunday. Given the three hour time zone difference, the start time of the pivotal Met-Marlin game coincided with my church worship. So, I brought my Black Berry to service and dialed into ESPN.com for their gameday coverage. The disastrous top of the first dovetailed my pastor's sermon. She could have been giving out one thousand dollar checks and I wouldn't have noticed. I was too busy following pitch after horrendous pitch. By the time we moved onto our weekly prayers, the Mets no longer had one. And there would be no need to roll the stone away from the Shea Stadium tomb. The Mets would not be resurrected.

I spent the afternoon far away from the New York Met suicide watch that had to be unfolding three thousand miles away. It was the last game at Dodger Stadium and my section's annual going away party. We watched the Dodgers complete Thud 2007. We followed the Padres and the Rockies on the scoreboard and the radio. We traded e-mail addresses for mid-winter connections. We said goodbye. We hugged. Yet, still, my mind continued to wander across the continent.

What the hell had happened in Flushing? Their 2007 marketing slogan was "Your Season Has Come."

And now Gone.

I came home from Chavez Ravine and immediately tuned into SNY for the answers. Everyone had several. None were conclusive. How does a team built for the World Series not remember that games counted after September 11? Is there an explanation to one of the most dreadful pennant drive collapses in baseball history?

I guess I saw most of it coming. While the Mets achieved 88 wins, I always felt that they were playing with house money. Like bullies in the playground, they could beat up the weaklings mightily, but cave as soon as another kid was one inch taller. Right from spring training, I thought their starting pitching was a collection of #4 starters. There was nobody on that staff who would scare an opponent. And that included Tom Glavine, who, to me, always seemed more focused on his 300 victories than anything else. And, in the last post season, GM Omar Minaya once again resorted to the South Bronx Yellow Pages as a scouting report in his retooling of the bullpen. While Omar wound up with a bunch of guys with Zs in their last name, folks like Chad Bradford, Heath Bell, Brian Bannister, and (gasp) even Darren Oliver wound up going elsewhere. So, when you have a mediocre bullpen for a staff of #4 starters who don't go more than 5 or 6 innings, you will wind up with an overall staff ERA of 5 plus in September. No surprise there for me.

But I am shocked how widespread the collapse really was. It was more than the starters and the bullpen. It was total and complete and devastating. Some say this experience will be a character builder for this team. Just as the ultimate defeat of 1985 led to the glory of 1986.

As far as I'm concerned...not with this bunch.

I'm going to go out on a limb here with some analysis you won't read in the papers or hear on SNY and WFAN. The Met problem resides squarely with Omar Minaya and his over-reliance on Hispanic ballplayers. Am I being prejudiced here? Maybe a tinge. I've written here before with some fervor of my disdain with the Shea Stadium experience now being nothing more than a carnivale in San Juan. But, I think the issue is real and valid.

I remember a few years back when the Yankees started having their postseason failures after 2000. A friend of mine who used to frequent the Yankee clubhouse told me of Manager Joe Torre and the coaching staff's inability to coach some of the Hispanic players on the team at that time. Was it a language barrier, I asked? Nope, my friend said. They just don't listen and pretty much do what they want to do when they want to. My friend said it was becoming a huge closed clubhouse clique and that the Yankees front office needed to break it up.

Shortly thereafter, Alphonso Soriano was dispatched elsewhere.

That toxic dynamic stuck with me as the Mets became more and more Latino-based over the past few years. Now, amid the debacle of the last three weeks, we are seeing small evidences of a similar clubhouse chemistry. Ground balls are not run out. Fly balls drop between fielders. Rumors of partying at Long Island dance clubs. And, from my cross country vantage point, most of it is coming from the folks with accents in their first names. Sure, you could say that the 1986 Mets did all of the above. But, that was a balanced team in all aspects and was not overrun by the "you can't tell me anything" ma-cheese-mo that dominated the 2007 Mets.

Carlos Delgado spends most of the season grounding into double plays. Carlos Beltran has a good statistical year that's essentially jammed into two months, while phoning it in the other four. And then there's Jose-Jose-Jose-Jose. He stockpiles his hits and stolen bases in the first half of the season like a squirrel's winter stash of nuts. After September 1, he becomes as invisible as Claude Rains. The swagger, crazy gyrations, and infantile dugout behavior disappears as the world catches up to him. And don't think for a moment that other teams haven't enjoyed exposing him the past month. I didn't see the bench clearing incident on Saturday, but I heard that Reyes' motor mouth was right in the middle of it. As I have predicted all summer, the little shortstop's antics would not go unnoticed---and unanswered for long. The asinine hijinks caught up to him like the cops finally got hold of OJ. Saturday's nonsense fired up the Marlins, who should have spent Sunday afternoon exchanging phone numbers for the winter. Instead, they went out and relished every moment of injecting formaldehyde into the Shea donkey farm.

Manager Willie Randolph is being lambasted for it all and that is unfair. In any given baseball season, every manager can be exclusively blamed for losing five to ten games. Out here in LA, I can fingerpoint Grady Little for so many losses that the Dodgers could have won 108 games. Nevertheless, that is a fact of baseball life. All managers, including the supposed geniuses Jim Leyland and Tony LaRussa, are one in the same. Not the scapegoat there.

And not the scapegoat here. Is Randolph perfect? Absolutely not. But, at the same time, he did the best he could do with what he was given. You can't give somebody a 1975 Vega and expect him to win Nascar. And the buttlescutt is that he had his hands tied like David Blaine. The front office (including that creep Jeff Wilpon) allegedly scouting the clubhouse as if they are secret shoppers in Macy's. And then essentially dictating his coaching staff. Howard Johnson as a hitting coach? How do you take advice from somebody who never hit a single curveball? And Rickey Henderson? What kind of senior influence can you get from a guy who talks about himself in the third person and hasn't found a deck of cards he couldn't cut? Is Willie safe? Who knows? But Minaya's comments on Monday were so non-committal and inept that I was convinced he was working for the Bush administration. He stumbled over every word as if he was reading out loud OJ's "If I Did It."

The 2007 Met Collapse is capitalized here because it will go down in history like the Hindenburg and the Black Plague. This past September will birddog the Met organization right into their first decade at Shitty Field. At the same time, they can make some changes moving forward to at least dull the everpresent pain. Construct a pitching rotation that has both a front end and a back end. Give Tom Glavine airfare back to Atlanta and also throw in the phone number for Ralph Branca's therapist. Leave the manager alone for one year. Let him have his own coaching staff and see how it goes. If Willie fails then, put him back on the 7 train and make sure he changes for the Lexington Avenue IRT to 161st and River Avenue. Give the manager the marching orders and the authority to counsel and discipline glorified Little Leaguers like Jose Reyes and Lastings Milledge so that their longterm careers aren't terminated prematurely by a Brandon Webb fastball to the skull.

And, above all, the Met front office must realize that a truly balanced team is not constructed with statistics. And, if the word "balanced" also includes a racial and ethnic facet, then so be it.

If they stay to the course, the Mets might as well rename Citi Field's new Jackie Robinson Rotunda in Gene Mauch's memory.

Dinner last night: Spaghetti and meatballs at Maria's Italian Kitchen.