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For Willie, it's win or else

Johnette Howard

March 28, 2008

The new season is here, but he is the only Met who doesn't get to shake the team's collapse last fall. As long as the 2008 Mets win, everything will be fine for manager Willie Randolph. But the first time the Mets show any serious vulnerability -- and you know slumps will come -- the memory of last September's disaster will come rushing back and Randolph will be on the hot seat. For him, it's pennant or bust in 2008. Win or else.

"I've been around this town a long time, man," Randolph likes to remind people.

So he knows how this works.

From the first pitch of Opening Day, Randolph will be operating on the shortest leash he's ever had as Mets manager. He's averaged 89 wins in three seasons. Yet all summer long, he'll be judged on these facts: He's been given top-notch talent as Mets manager. Ownership is footing a payroll in the neighborhood of $140 million and building a new ballpark that will open next spring. His general manager made the splashiest trade of the offseason, landing ace Johan Santana, to lift the fatalism shrouding the franchise and give the Mets license to talk big again.

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The paradox is this: Santana's arrival vastly improves the Mets' chances of a World Series trip, but having Santana gives Ran dolph the slimmest margin of error of any manager in the big leagues.

Most experts, not just love-addled Mets fans, have rushed to anoint the Mets as the 2008 National League pennant-winner because of how they stack up on paper despite how creaky and injury-prone they have looked this spring. And Randolph isn't downplaying the Mets' chances, either. He came back to spring training chirping, "I love this team."

But if the Mets wilt again in late summer, Randolph won't be back in 2009. He could be in trouble if the Mets start slowly. They play division rivals Philadelphia and Atlanta 12 times in April alone.

Randolph has accomplished much good here. It's hard to fault him completely for the players' contagious funk during their stretch-run fade of '07. But Randolph clearly wasn't the difference-maker as all that unfolded, either. And that shadows him this season, too. He has to get to the World Series, or at least fall short so heroically that no one questions if he is the right man to manage this team.

Randolph says, "I know what's expected." He's known heartbreak, but he also insists, "I don't ever really feel pressure." He says he was so upset about last season's nosedive that he didn't feel like himself until the holidays rolled around. He raked over the final few weeks in his mind again and again. He never got the feeling the Mets were too complacent.

Randolph believes what ultimately doomed them is "we weren't ready to be a champion. Baseball is funny. It can fool you. You think -- because it's such a long marathon -- we've got time, we've got time. But the game is cruel sometimes. When you think you've got time, you don't.

"What championship teams get is winning imposes a discipline. An unselfishness. A mindset. Maybe what my team learned from last year is you have to play like that every day. You don't wait till the end of the season to act like a champion. It's your mind-set from day one -- take baseball personally. Don't give up anything. Not one day. And then, at the end of the season, you have house money to play with, to ride out things like what happened to us."

Randolph now thinks that maybe, just maybe, he should have said more to the team in the season's dying days. Maybe he should have drawn on his experiences rather than trusting his veterans to put aside their building shock and dread, dig down and come through.

"Maybe I should have said something more," Randolph allows. "But that's just a flip-of-the-coin-type thing."

It was a judgment call, that's all. The kind that can get you fired. Or keep you up at night for years.